The Tang Horse

"The Horse Is the Nation's Armour"

马者，国之武备，天去其备，国将危亡 — the horse is the nation's armour; heaven takes its armour away, and the state will perish. The line is from the New Book of Tang, and it was written about a disaster. In 681 the government herds lost a hundred and eighty thousand horses in a single year, and the historian set the sentence down as an omen.

The state counted horses the way it counted troops. Central Asian horses came into China along the Silk Road in a steady stream, and the numbers moved accordingly. Luoyang's cultural heritage bureau gives the change plainly: from fewer than ten thousand horses at the beginning of the Tang, the national herd grew to several hundred thousand by the high Tang.

Several hundred thousand horses is not a fact about animals. It is a fact about a state that could move armies, carry grain and hold a frontier — and about an animal that had become, in effect, part of the government.

Which is why the horse is everywhere in Tang art. It is on the walls of tombs, in the reliefs of imperial monuments, and above all in the pottery. No other animal is modelled so often, at such size, or with such attention.

The Horse on the Silk Road

On the routes west of Chang'an and Luoyang, two animals carried the trade: the camel and the horse.

The camel is the one usually called the ship of the desert, and Tang tombs are full of them. The horse is the one the state cared about. Both turn up in the same form in excavated tombs — a Central Asian groom leading the animal, sometimes a camel, sometimes a horse. These figures, 胡人牵马俑 and 胡人牵驼俑, are among the most common finds in Tang tombs in Luoyang, and they are also the period's clearest statement about where its horses came from.

The groom is not a servant in the background of the composition. He is part of the subject. A Tang horse in a tomb almost always comes with the man who handled it, and both of them are marked as coming from the west.

Luoyang's place on those routes is not a matter of inference. Three of the city's sites are inscribed on the Silk Road world heritage listing — the Han-Wei Luoyang city site, the Dingding Gate of the Sui-Tang city, and the Han dynasty Hangu Pass — a set that Chinese heritage authorities describe as a chain of city, gate, pass and road. The horses came in through exactly that chain.

What a Tang Horse Looks Like

The Palace Museum's three-colour horse is 76.5 cm tall and 88 cm long. The museum's own description is exact about the animal: ears pricked, eyes wide, standing still on its plinth. It wears a halter, a breast strap and a crupper hung with apricot-leaf pendants, a saddle over a wrapped saddle cloth, a carved pad and a mud guard, and its tail is tied in a knot. The glaze is white, green and ochre across the whole body.

What the museum singles out for praise is the modelling — accurate in proportion, and above all the four legs, which it calls strong and vividly drawn. The horse is standing, not moving. The legs are what make the standing convincing.

The build is as deliberate as the glazing. Tang horses of this type are heavy-necked, deep-chested and short-legged by comparison with later Chinese horse figures, and the Chinese descriptions of them are blunt about the body: 膘肥体壮, fat in flesh and strong in build. What is being modelled is not a Chinese pony. It is the imported animal the state was spending so much to obtain.

Three Flowers on the Mane

Some Tang horses are shown with the mane clipped into lobes, and the number of lobes matters.

The National Museum of China states it directly: a sanhua ma, a three-flower horse, is one whose mane has been trimmed into three sections. All six of the horses carved on Emperor Taizong's Zhaoling reliefs are clipped this way, and the museum's reading of the convention is that the three-flower cut "should represent the highest grade." Tang tomb figures show horses with one lobe and two lobes as well; three is the top of the range.

The example the museum gives is a three-colour horse 54 cm tall and 52.7 cm long, excavated in 1957 from a tomb at Xi'an. Its mane is trimmed and dressed into three lobes, and that is what gives the type its name.

So the cut is not grooming. On the museum's reading it is a mark of grade, and it tells you what kind of animal is being shown. A Tang horse figure is not a generic horse. It is a specific grade of horse, clipped in a specific way, wearing a specific set of tack.

Buried With Their Owners

The horses that survive are the ones that were buried. A Tang tomb was furnished, and three-colour ware was made for that purpose — it served as a burial good, and in the high Tang the amount of it placed in a tomb, and the size of the pieces, reflected the rank of the person buried there.

In 1981, the tomb of An Pu and his wife, in Luoyang, yielded four three-colour horses: one white-glazed, one white-glazed with apricot-leaf pendants, one with a green mud guard and red glaze, and one black-glazed. All four are in the Luoyang Museum. An Pu was a man of An — the Central Asian city we now know as Bukhara — and a general of the Tang; the tomb was built for him and his wife in 709. The black horse is the famous one — its head is raised and all four legs are braced, and black glaze of this kind is rare. It is about 73 cm tall, and only two black-glazed three-colour horses have been excavated anywhere in China.

The other one is in the National Museum of China, excavated at Guanlin in Luoyang in 1972. It is white at the face, mane, tail and hooves and black everywhere else — a distribution the museum describes as 四蹄踏雪, four hooves treading snow.

The great Tang tombs elsewhere in the country furnished their owners the same way. The tomb of Crown Prince Zhanghuai, near Xi'an, carries a polo match on its west wall and a hunting expedition on its east wall, both of them crowded with horses in motion. The tomb of Crown Prince Yide, in the same cemetery, yielded figures of warriors on gilt-armoured horses among its grave goods.

The horse runs through all of it — as a mount, as a possession, and as a thing worth painting.

A Symbol You Can Still Buy

What the Tang did with the horse was to make it stand for something larger than itself: the reach of the empire, the wealth of the court, and how important the person in the tomb had been. The animal that held the frontier became the animal that held up a tomb.

Luoyang is where a great many of these figures came out of the ground. The entry on China's intangible heritage register notes the consequence: because so many fine three-colour pieces have been excavated at Luoyang, the craft itself is also known as Luoyang sancai.

The city still makes them. The stocky build, the raised head, the braced legs — the forms are drawn from the excavated figures, and the techniques behind them are described in our articles on Tang sancai and on how a piece is read.

The pieces are on the main site: the Tang dynasty horse, and the wider Tang sancai range it belongs to.