"Should one lift his head like a powerful steed, or drift with the current like a duck upon the water?"
The question comes from Chuci (Songs of Chu), one of the most important poetry anthologies of early China. The collection embodies a distinctive tradition that flourished in the southern state of Chu during China’s Warring States Period (475-221 BC).
A few centuries later, Cao Cao (155-220) — a warlord-poet who rose to dominance near the end of the second century — offered his own answer. “The old steed, tethered in the stable, still yearns to gallop 1,000 miles; the hero, though in his twilight years, holds fast to a heart that never ages.” Written around 213, at a moment when age pressed upon him, even as ambition still burned, the verse captures both the fatigue of a lifetime and the undimmed desire for one more triumph.
“On one side stands the image of the mighty horse; on the other, the figure of the unyielding hero. Over time, the two fuse,” says Ma Shunping, an expert in ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy at the Palace Museum in Beijing.
In fact, there has long been a belief that only a true hero is worthy of a legendary steed — and few would dispute that Cao Cao was one. His most famous horse, Jueying (Swift Shade), was said to run so swiftly that it cast no shadow.
During a fierce battle in 197, when Cao Cao was ambushed by enemy forces, Jueying carried him through a storm of arrows to safety — pressing on, despite being mortally wounded and collapsing shortly afterward.
Jueying’s death secured the horse a place among China’s most storied steeds, a lasting emblem of loyalty and sacrifice — and, at the same time, cast it as a mirror of its rider: steadfast in crisis, relentless in pursuit, and willing to give everything in the struggle to survive and prevail.
If any figure in Chinese history is inseparable from great warhorses, it is Li Shimin — Emperor Taizong (598-649), the second ruler of the Tang Dynasty (618-907). Before his death, the architect of Tang’s rise commissioned a set of stone reliefs depicting the six horses that bore him through the decisive campaigns that led to the dynasty’s founding. Installed at Zhaoling, his mausoleum near present-day Xi’an in Shaanxi province, the carvings formed part of the funerary landscape.
Over time, the reliefs — now known as the Zhaoling Six Horses — were dispersed: four remain in China, while the other two were taken abroad in the early 20th century and are now held in the United States by the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.
Of the two, one portrays the horse Saluzi — the name meaning “Autumn Dew” — at the moment an arrow is being withdrawn from its body by a man, making it the only relief in the group to include a human figure.
Nearly a century later, Li Longji — Emperor Taizong’s great-grandson and the seventh ruler of the Tang — commissioned a portrait of his favored charger, Zhaoyebai (Night-Shining White), painted around 750 by court artist Han Gan.
Now in the collection of New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the work is widely regarded as the greatest equine portrait in Chinese painting. With blazing eyes, flared nostrils and restless hooves, the horse appears on the verge of breaking free from its tether, its bristling energy barely contained.
Equally striking are the seals and inscriptions added over the course of a millennium by later owners and admirers, a hallmark of Chinese connoisseurship that traces the painting’s transmission and enduring influence. Among them are several poems and seals by the Qing Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799), who once held the scroll himself and wrote of the white horse as “resembling pear blossoms in a moonlit courtyard”.
“Though muzzled, it refuses to be saddled,” lamented the Qing emperor. “The painter’s intention is at once revealed and concealed.”
“Noble aspiration and moral strength — these are what the Chinese read in such images, ideals that allowed the horses to endure in the collective cultural imagination long after they had lost their central military role to long-range, high-firepower weapons during the reign of Emperor Qianlong,” says Ma.
Around this time, missionary artists — who had first entered China in the late 16th century — began to play a more active role at the Qing court. Foremost among them was Giuseppe Castiglione (1688-1766), an Italian Jesuit missionary who served three generations of Qing emperors, including Qianlong.
