While a TV drama about Wu Zetian, China’s only female emperor – played by actress Liu Xiaqing – broke TV records in China in 2014, a documentary on her shown on Sunday night over Channel 4 in Britain failed to impress.
The Telegraph writer Gerard O’Donovan pointed out that the documentary hardly featured anything about "China's Forgotten Emperor." The only thing really connected with Wu Zetian shown in the documentary was the phallic monument build in the female ruler’s honor at the “Valley of the Kings” in Qianling.
The failed expectations must have been because Donovan had been to Chang’an, known now as Xi’an, where Wu ruled, and the writer saw one of the palaces the emperor commissioned. But in the documentary, he observed seeing a fabulous headdress, gravestone and a lot of underground infrastructures and carvings that were not Wu’s.
Wu, who started as a concubine when she entered the court at age 13, ruled for 50 years and become the only female imperial emperor whose reign was marked by stability and prosperity, noted The Guardian.
But the show offered little information about Wu. Because Donovan met historians and archaeologists who had some opinion on what kind of a ruler the emperor was, he was expecting either a confirmation or repudiation of those theories on the fierce nature of Wu – but none came.
Donovan, however, admitted that part of his disappointment with the documentary stems from watching a lot of historical drama lately, such as “Marco Polo,” “Versailles” and “Game of Thrones” that featured dynastic power politics “played out on an epic, blood drenched and highly fantasised scale” that real or “unalloyed” history failed to live up to his expectations.