The best thing about researching visual sources for Wu Zetian is that she has been meticulously documented in multiple TV dramas and movies (check Wikipedia for that full list).

There has been a number of pop cultural productions of Wu’s life story, but in terms of historical accuracy, the most reliable is probably the 1995 TV series “Wu Zetian” (starring Liu Xiaoqing). Being produced by the Chinese government means that the accuracy factor was probably quite strict, and so I drew some cues from it for my art. You can watch the entire series on Youtube.

Above is an example of the artwork I did that used cues from the 1995 “Wu Zetian” TV series. However, I should stress that I took some artistic liberties with the depictions, for my own ease. An example would be the last panel (pg15), which shows Wu Zetian sitting in on court sessions behind a screen next to Gaozong. In real history, the screen was behind Gaozong, not next to him, but that would have been impossible to show properly in a comic panel, so I moved it. On the other hand, after Gaozong’s death (pg20), Wu did move the screen from behind the throne to next to it.

The TV series covered most of my art sources, so the rest of it I got from the book “China’s Golden Age: Everyday Life in the Tang Dynasty” by Charles Benn (2002), Oxford University Press, Oxford.