The emperor's war-horses keep up the fight

 On a recent visit to the V&A, I was taken aback by this strange clay sculpture of a horse from 3rd or 4th century China. Is that an asparagus growing out of its head?

Source: Victoria & Albert Museum

Anyway, it set me thinking about horses in Chinese art, and in particular those depicted on carved stone panels at the tomb of the emperor Taizong. Looking further into this, I learned something about the panels’ troubled history.

Taizong (r. 626 to 649 AD), the second emperor of the Tang dynasty, is revered in Chinese history as a great ruler: a fearless warrior, highly literate, concerned for the welfare of his people, and open to foreign trade and culture. In many ways, he laid the foundations for the brilliance of the Tang dynasty. The Tang ruling elite were passionate about horses and equestrian sports, including polo which was especially popular among women. They imported top-quality horses from expert breeders in Central Asia whose livestock was superior to the rather weedy local ponies. The Tang love of horses was reflected in their art, notably in the horse figurines which are a must-have for any wealthy Chinese antique collector (see below).

Source: Metropolitan Museum, New York

More importantly, good horses were vital to the army and therefore a symbol of dynastic power and prestige. Taizong led his troops into battle on a series of mighty war-horses which he loved so much that he chose the six greatest ones and had their images engraved on stone panels, each accompanied by a poetic epitaph which he wrote himself. In accordance with his wishes, the huge panels (each measuring 1.6m x 2m) were installed as part of his tomb complex at Zhaoling, 60km north-west of Xian in Shaanxi Province.

Source: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

The most famous of the six panels (shown above) depicts the horse named Saluzi, or Autumn Dew. The story goes that while carrying Taizong into battle, Saluzi was hit by an arrow. Taizong’s army chief, General Qiu, pulled the arrow out of Saluzi’s chest then and there, the brave horse showing no sign of pain or suffering. The sculptor (whose identity is unknown) has portrayed Saluzi standing calmly with his legs angled slightly forward, bracing himself, while the general’s knees are bent to show the force needed to extract the arrow.

Each of the six horses was chosen because it carried Taizong to victory at a particularly important battle. All of them sustained serious injuries in the process: for example, the horse named Quan Mao Gua (Curly-haired) was hit by nine arrows but continued to surge forward bravely, as shown in the carving below – the picture isn’t very good but you might just make out two arrows sticking out behind the saddle. 

Source: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology

A black horse with white socks named Bai Di Wu (White-footed Crow) reportedly carried Taizong on an epic 100km ride through the night. His panel shows him in a “flying gallop”, all four feet off the ground, and his poetic epitaph reads:

With a sword long enough to touch the sky

And this swift steed that could run with the wind

On a gallop I recovered Long

With one look I brought peace to Shu.

倚天長劒, 追風駿足, 聳轡平隴, 囘鞍定蜀.

It turns out, however, that the panels are the subject of a long-running dispute between the University of Pennsylvania Museum, which currently owns the two shown above, and the museum authorities in Xian where the other four remain. According to the UPM’s records, it first received the two panels in 1918 on loan from the Paris-based Chinese art dealer Loo Ching Tsai (known as CT Loo). The museum eventually purchased them from Loo in early 1921 for $125,000. 

It emerged that the panels’ provenance was shady, to say the least. The UPM received a letter in June 1921 from a French collector named Paul Mallon, who thought they might like to know that he had paid a fellow Frenchman named Grosjean to “obtain” the panels from Taizong’s tomb in 1912. Unfortunately, the grave-robbers hired by Grosjean were “attacked by peasants” while carting the loot away. The panels were confiscated by local officials and sent to the district museum. And so poor Monsieur Mallon was left out of pocket, quelle domage. 

The next problem is that no-one knows how the panels ended up in the US. After their sojourn at the district museum, they turned up in Beijing in the possession of the new ruler of post-imperial China, the warlord Yuan Shi-Kai. CT Loo claimed that the shipment to the US was arranged by a local middleman who was authorised by “the supreme authority of the country”, implying that either Yuan, his family or someone in his government had approved the deal, which is perfectly plausible but impossible to verify.

CT Loo himself had a controversial reputation. An orphan who moved to France in 1902 as servant to a Chinese businessman, he became the pre-eminent dealer in ancient Chinese, Indian and South-East Asian art, catering to wealthy collectors and major museums in the US and Europe. Anyone studying the provenance of Asian antiquities in the West will encounter his name repeatedly: an online search of the Smithsonian’s Freer-Sackler collection turns up over 300 hits. As a result, he came to be viewed with suspicion for his links with objects of questionable origin, the Taizong horses being a well-known example. He always denied any wrongdoing, and was in fact known for his philanthropy towards Chinese causes up until his death in 1957.

   

So where does that leave our heroic horses? Demands for their return have been made by authorities in Xian every few years but the UPM is not giving in. Perhaps tellingly, the issue has not come up at the highest diplomatic levels, suggesting that the Chinese central government is not (yet) interested in turning this into an Elgin Marbles situation. Will this change in the new climate of Sino-US relations? The horses probably don’t mind: they’ve seen a lot worse.

Reference material: "Emperor Taizong and his six horses", Zhou Xiuqin, Orientations 32, No 2 (2001); "CT Loo: highs and lows of a great art dealer", presentation by Geraldine Lenain to the Asia Society, Hong Kong (link here)