Penn Corrals the Tang Emperor’s Horses
American collectors of Chinese art made their global debut in 1935–36 at an epochal International Exhibition of Chinese Art held by the Royal Academy at Burlington House, Piccadilly. Not only were U.S. museums among the 240 lenders, but for the first time China permitted a substantial number of its “national treasures” (the republic’s preferred term) to appear on loan abroad. The admiralty provided a warship, the HMS Suffolk, to transport more than eight hundred imperial treasures in ninety-three cases. The two greatest British collectors of the period, George Eumorfopoulos and Percival David, helped gather the artworks, working with Robert Lockhart Hobson of the British Museum and the prominent dealers C. T. Loo and Sadajiro Yamanaka. The exhibition, described as the largest Chinese show ever mounted, was both a popular and a critical success.
The event took place against a background of Japan’s occupation of Manchukuo (formerly Manchuria) and its looming invasion of China, and the government authorities hoped they would garner international sympathy for China as well as the world’s appreciation of its art. For the first time, Western and Eastern connoisseurship could be matched side by side. To be sure, there were sotto voce complaints: from the West, that the Chinese had held back their best paintings, assuming that foreign experts would not be able to tell the difference, setting back scholarship in the West for decades; and from China, notably among scholars based at Tsinghua University, that foreigners had been authorized to make the selections, that the borrowed objects were uninsured, “that important and valuable treasures should not be sent abroad,” and that “once the art is acquired by the British Museum it will never be allowed to leave its portals whatever may be its value.” These objections did not move Chinese authorities anxious to cultivate Western goodwill and burnish their republic’s image as a rising power. From November 1935 to March 1936, the crowds came; total attendance (401,768 recorded visits) broke all records. In those pre-blockbuster times, in the very depth of a worldwide depression, Chinese art had arrived!
Stone bas relief depicting the Tang Emperor Taizong’s cherished horse, Autumn Dew, a Penn Museum loan to the Burlington show.
Harvard’s Fogg Museum sent two wall painting fragments, its prize bodhisattva from Dunhuang and, as an invited lecturer, Langdon Warner. America’s newest museum, the William Rockhill Nelson Gallery of Art at Kansas City, just opened in 1933, sent twenty-five items, among them its famous jade Bi (see color plates, figure 2), plus its future curatorial star, Laurence Sickman. Abby Rockefeller shipped her Tang bodhisattva from her country home, Kykuit. Objects from Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) were notably absent. Its omnipotent benefactor and trustee, Denman Ross, adamantly opposed lending art to exhibitions, so America’s premier collection was not represented. But the showstopper was the prize of the University of Pennsylvania’s collection, Autumn Dew, one of the museum’s pair of carved stone reliefs from the Tang Emperor Taizong’s mausoleum near Xi’an.
In 636 CE, Emperor Taizong, as he was known posthumously, commissioned a mausoleum for himself and his Empress Zhangsun, fifty-six miles northwest of his capital, Chang’an, (present-day Xi’an) in Shaanxi Province. With a circumference of more than thirty-seven miles, the Zhaoling is probably the largest royal mausoleum in the world. Built high on the peak of Jiuzong Mountain, Taizong intended it to demonstrate his imperial power, but its architects also designed it to prevent looting. An inscription by the emperor reads: “A ruler takes the whole land under Heaven as his home. Why should he keep treasures within his tomb, possessing them as his private property? Now that the tomb has been built on Jiuzong Mountain with no gold, no jade, no slaves or horses within and the household utensils all made of earth and wood, thieves and robbers will cease their attempts, saving trouble for every one.”
The celebrated Tang poet Du Fu recalls passing by some years later:
A line of tombs winds skyward up the slope
Where mountain beasts keep to their leafy lair;
I peer along a pine and cypress lane
Only clouds of sunset hanging in the air.
Two famous brothers—Yan Lide and Yan Liben, architects, painters, and court officials—are credited with the design of the tomb, which is tunneled into the mountain and guarded by five stone gates. Abutting the tomb chamber are two wings with stone boxes for sacrificial objects. In spite of the emperor’s precautions, Wen Tao, a warlord of the Five Dynasties (died circa 926), broke into the tomb and found that its contents were “no different from that of the living world. The center is the main burial chamber; two side chambers are arranged in the east and west, lined with stone couches, on top of which are placed stone caskets with metal boxes inside. Paper and ink of treasured books and calligraphy of Zhong (Yao) and Wang (Xizhi) were as fresh as new.”
Zhaoling was designed to replicate architecturally Taizong’s compound at his capital, Chang’an. As such, it was divided into three components: the palace city, the imperial city, and the outer city, all like those of Chang’an. It took thirteen years to construct and included at latest count nearly two hundred auxiliary tombs of nobles, imperial relatives, favored court officials who had distinguished themselves in the imperial service, and generals.
During his reign, Taizong subdued the Turkish tribes, and when they traveled to Chang’an to offer their fealty, they asked him to assume the title of Heavenly Qaghan or Khan of Khans. He replied: “I who am the son of Heaven for the Great Tang will also deign to carry out the duties of the qaghans.” The Turks were subsumed into the multiethnic, multicultural society that was the Tang Empire, in which foreigners—merchants, monks, and members of distant communities—were welcomed to the capital. The rulers of these foreign ethnic groups were also allowed to be buried in the complex, as part of a successful effort of the Tang Empire to reward and consolidate its minorities, treating non-Chinese the same as Chinese. The prospect of an honorary burial in an auxiliary tomb ensured loyalty to the Son of Heaven and the Qaghan of Qaghans.
Ten years after Taizong finally became emperor in 636 CE, in order to commemorate the major events of his military campaigns he commissioned relief sculptures of his favored horses. Excavations at Zhaoling in 2003 uncovered pillar bases that suggested the sculptures were placed along a long corridor with pavilions on each side. The Penn horses appear to have been erected in the fifth and sixth pavilions. Yan Liben (died 673 CE), credited as the painter of the MFA’s Thirteen Emperors scroll (see color plates, figure 13), is also assumed to have made the drawings for the carved reliefs (six and a half feet long by five feet tall, and more than a foot thick). A text records Taizong’s commission for images of his six favorite battle-chargers that he had ridden in his successful campaigns:
Since I engaged in military campaigns, those war chargers which carried me rushing on the enemy and breaking the line, and which rescued me from perils, their true images should be portrayed on stone and placed left and right of my tomb to demonstrate the righteousness of “curtain and cover.”
Penn’s senior registrar, Dr. Xiuqin Zhou, the author of a dissertation and several articles on the Zhaoling and its horses, explains this imperial fixation: “In the old days, masters usually saved chariot curtains and covers for the burial of their horses and dogs to show their affections and righteousness.”
Taizong, also known by his personal name Li Shimin, meaning “rescuing the world and pacifying the people,” composed a eulogy in praise of each horse. He extolled “Autumn Dew,” also known as “Whirlwind Victory”:
It was as restless as a purple swallow,
It pranced with its high spirits,
It was feared along the region of the three rivers,
It struck awe into the enemy on all battlefields.
The emperor, who spent most of his life campaigning, rode the bay horse during his conquest of the eastern capital, Luoyang (in today’s Henan Province), in 621 CE. The relief illustrated a widely known story concerning General Qiu Xinggong. When an arrow hit Autumn Dew, Qiu jumped from his horse, pulled the arrow from the horse’s chest, and gave his own horse to Taizong while he pursued the enemy on foot, killing several of them with his sword.
Quan Mao Gua, whose name means “saffron-yellow horse with a wavy coat of hair,” earned the nickname “Curly.” He was the putative emperor’s mount during the battle against a rival, Liu Heida, in 622 CE, when the charger was wounded with nine arrows. The emperor’s poem reads:
The moon rabbit grabbed the bridle
The stars of Scorpio crossed the heaven in their course.
The dog-star carried the halberd
The dusty mist brought the end.
“Autumn Dew” and “Curly” are on display in the Penn Museum; the remaining four horses are now in the Beilin Museum in Xi’an. Two of the horses, including Curly, are shown walking; three of the other horses are shown with all four legs extended in the “flying gallop.” The tails of all the horses are tied up, and their special dressing of a crenellated mane in three tufts, called the “three flower” arrangement, indicated that the rider was a prince or emperor.
Taizong’s reign ushered in a period of peace and prosperity, a veritable Golden Age that lasted nearly four centuries. Thanks to his military successes, he expanded the empire to include much of what is now no longer China: namely, Vietnam, Mongolia, and the lands westward into Central Asia as far as present-day Kazakhstan. Taizong’s rule was characterized by a well-functioning administration run by professional bureaucrats chosen for their abilities and education. (Fearing assassination, he is also remembered for killing his two brothers, thus allowing him to become emperor after his father abdicated.)
The success of the Tang dynasty depended on its horses, its mounted cavalry. Spotting a fine horse on the battlefield, Taizong ordered his general to capture the rider to gain the horse. During the early Tang period, there was an enormous increase in the number of horses, from 3,000 to more than 700,000, mostly bred from Turkic stock obtained through tribute or trade with the tribes in the west, including the famous Ferghana breed from the Kang state. All Taizong’s six horses appear to be descended from these imports. Having grown up on horseback, Taizong was inordinately fond of his horses. Angered by the death of one of his beloved mounts, he ordered the groom executed. Only the intervention of his wife saved the servant. During the Tang, horses were needed not only for warfare but also as a means of effectively connecting China with its northern and western frontiers once the trade routes—that is, the Silk Roads—were well established. Postal horses were in demand for these routes, as well as for stations linking Chang’an to the other Tang capital of Luoyang.
Taizong would not be the last poet-emperor or the first to love horses. More than two thousand years ago, the Han emperor Wudi faced incursions from the northwest by a group of martial nomads known as the Xiongnu (Hsiung-nu). Living on the steppes in tents or covered wagons, they counted their wealth in livestock and dressed in brilliant, ornamented clothing. Their horsemen, armed with bows, proved their mettle against the Chinese infantry. Now the emperor needed cavalry on mounts swifter than the Xiongnu’s steppe ponies.
Attempts at domestic breeding of imported horse stock had failed, apparently owing to the lack of calcium in the soil and water. So Emperor Wudi sent an army forty thousand strong, led by General Li Guangli, the brother of his favorite concubine, westward in hopes of obtaining the “blood-sweating horses” from the Ferghana Valley, and in doing so nearly brought his empire to an end.
First reported by Zhang Qian (Chang Chien), the Han Empire’s envoy to the Western Regions, the tianma, translated as “heavenly horses,” were valued for their stamina, height, and agility and were an improvement over the steppe ponies. Zhang reported that he had encountered wonder horses that sweated blood in the land of Ferghana (now Turkmenistan). A ritual hymn recited in the imperial sacrifices eulogizes the “Heavenly Horse”:
Bedewed with red sweat
That foams in an ochre stream,
And of abounding energy,
He treads the fleeting clouds,
Dim in his upward flight;
With smooth and easy gait
Covers a thousand leagues.
One theory is that the “blood-sweating” resulted from the presence of a parasitic nematode, Parafilaria multipapillos, common to the Russian steppes, which burrows into the skin of the horse, causing nodules that bleed. Another theory posits that after a long, sustained gallop, the horses’ blood vessels burst.
Initially the Chinese attempted to acquire the horses from the Ferghana ruler by purchasing them with a thousand pieces of gold and a golden horse. He rejected the offer and executed the emperor’s envoys. Next, Wudi sent an army under General Li across the Taklamakan Desert, but by the time it arrived at Ferghana (Ta-yuan, Dayuan) it was exhausted and starving. Then the Son of Heaven dispatched another sixty thousand men beyond the Pamirs to conquer Ferghana, culminating in a final forty-day siege when the Chinese cut off the water supply, after which the king of Ferghana was beheaded by his own people. The Ferghanans then agreed to dispatch three thousand horses to Chang’an, the Han capital. But only a few—perhaps thirty—were the “superior” or “heavenly” breed, and along the way two thousand of them died. As Wudi waited for the steeds he had been promised to reach the Jade Gate, he composed the following hymn:
The Heavenly Horses are coming,
Coming from the Far West.
They crossed the Flowing Sands,
For the barbarians are conquered,
The Heavenly Horses are coming
That issued from the waters of a pool.
Two of them have tiger backs;
They can transform themselves like spirits.
The Heavenly Horses are coming
Across the pastureless wilds
A thousand leagues at a stretch,
Following the eastern road.
The Heavenly Horses are coming;
Jupiter is in the Dragon.*
Should they choose to soar aloft,
Who could keep pace with them?
The Heavenly Horses are coming;
Open the gates while there is time.
They will draw me up and carry me
To the Holy Mountain of k’un-lun [Kunlun mountain range].
The Heavenly Horses have come.
And the Dragon will follow in their wake.
I shall reach the Gates of Heaven,
I shall see the Palace of God.
In 2009, archaeologists found two sacrificial pits within the mausoleum of Emperor Wudi, along with the bones of eighty stallions guarding twenty caves in two huge caverns—horses sacrificed to accompany him on his glorious afterlife, confirming Arthur Waley’s theory that the magic horses were more often used in ritual than in warfare. Future DNA tests should confirm whether Wudi’s horses were bred from Akhal-Teke stock, a Turkmen horse with excellent speed and stamina.
Wudi’s military campaign to Ferghana represents one of the first contacts between the Indo-European cultures and China, leading to the apogee of the Silk Road. Throughout the Tang dynasty, horses were also a staple of tomb furnishings. But what about Taizong’s favorite mounts? Upon his death, the stones were placed along the “spirit path” within the northern gateway of the burial complex, which once included the “Rosefinch Gate,” a sacrificial hall, and a “Lower Palace” surrounded by a wall and large numbers of houses. Little of these surface structures remains.
Langdon Warner and Horace Jayne, visiting Xi’an in 1924 on their first expedition to Dunhuang, reported that the remaining horses had been “pulley-hauled” from their original site. “Four of them were brought into the town, where we saw them rather meanly set up against the garden wall in the little museum, but happily safe from our American dollars. The other two, somewhat split and battered, are the pride of the University Museum in Philadelphia.”
Recognized as incomparable masterpieces, they have been called “China’s Elgin Marbles,” their plunder often cited as an example of America’s predatory imperialism. But how, then, did they get to Philadelphia? Xiuqin Zhou, the registrar of the Penn Museum, drawing on the museum’s archives, painstakingly reconstructed the journey of Autumn Dew and Curly from Xi’an to Philadelphia. (Penn has had a laudable policy of revealing the history of its acquisitions.)
The six steeds were still in place when the French scholar Edouard Chavannes saw them in 1909. His photographs are the only documentation of the horses as they were before they were removed from the Zhaoling. During her research, Dr. Zhou found a 1921 letter in the Penn archives from a Paris art dealer, Paul Mallon, stating that he had advanced a large sum of money through an intermediary, a Monsieur A. Grosjean in Peking, who had sent a man, Monsieur Galenzi, to find a way to take them away. “In May 1913, the horses were taken from the Emperor’s tomb; unhappily the men transporting them were attacked by peasants and the precious relics thrown down a precipice.” (Mallon added that he had lost “a big sum of money” that he had advanced for the purchase.)
The two horses were next taken to the old governor’s office in Shaanxi Province and given to Lu Jianzhang, the provincial military commander, “to win his favor.” Then President Yuan Shikai, formerly the province’s dominant warlord, had them officially removed to Peking. It was then that the Paris dealer C. T. Loo’s name appears in association with the reliefs. Some years later, on September 11, 1927, in a letter we found in the Harvard Archives, Loo confided his problems related to the purchase of the horses to Langdon Warner: “You will be surprised to see this letter dated Vladivostock, instead of Peking, well, the reason is that I was notified enroute that actually [sic] Government wants to arrest me because of the sale of the Tang Tai Tsun horses. . . . With regard to the Horses, you know as well as all the world that they were stolen by foreigners in 1912.” Loo claimed to have purchased the horses from a Peking dealer named Zhao Hefang, who was acquainted with a son of Yuan Shikai. Zhao proposed that the stones be used to decorate the Yuan family’s Imperial Garden, as Yuan Shikai was then making preparations for what was to be his three-month reign as emperor. The Yuan family provided special seals that allowed them to leave Xi’an for Peking. As Loo further justifies his actions in this letter to Warner: “If a thing bought through the President, was not legal, than who would have the authority to sell? And if it was legal at that time but no more legal now, then how many dealers and collectors would be in the same situation?”
Very likely with the help of the Yuan family, Loo was able to ship the steeds to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, where George Byron Gordon, the director of Penn’s University Museum, saw them in storage on March 9, 1918. As a loan to the university’s museum, Loo offered “without expense to it, two sculptures representing a pair of horses in high relief which come from the ancient capital of Si’anfu,” with an option until 1921 to buy them for $150,000. The wily Loo bid up the price, claiming that his agents had “risked imprisonment and even their lives.” The horses were shipped by truck to Philadelphia, where they arrived on May 8. Fund-raising proceeded slowly until an angel named Eldridge R. Johnson, the founder of the Victor Talking Machine Company and a member of the museum’s board of managers, anted up $125,000 (the renegotiated 1920 price) and had his name placed under the reliefs. Shortly afterward, Carl Bishop, then curator of Asian art, remarked, “Perhaps no horses existed that have ever become so famous.” As for Yan Liben, “Of the artist who wrought these masterpieces, we know practically nothing . . . [but] the sculptures themselves proclaim him one of the greatest artists of any age or nation.” Thus did the Penn Museum corral the Tang emperor’s horses.
* In the duodenary cycle, the year Wudi wrote the poem, 101 BCE, was a Dragon year. Sinologist Frances Wood writes that the heavenly horses were linked with dragons, the mythical beasts associated with the emperors of China. The Ferghana horses would carry the Son of Heaven to the Kunlun Mountains thought to be the home of the immortals. Thus the horses could be a vehicle for Wudi’s own immortality.