The Supernatural Horses That Fascinated Chinese Emperors

You could call the “heavenly horse” a half-legendary beast. In legends, it could travel a thousand li—about four hundred miles—in a single day. Riding it was like flying over the ground; it was to the Earth what a dragon is to the air. Its back was marked like a tiger’s, and at peak exertion, it sweated blood, staining its body red like cinnabar, giving rise to its other name, the “blood-sweating” horse.

The mythical fleetness of these horses is best represented by a bronze statue uncovered from a second-century Chinese tomb: tail flying, legs outstretched in wild motion, the heavy sculpture seems impossibly balanced on only one slender foot, which is itself perched on a tiny bird.

Some believe that the Akhal-Teke of Turkmenistan is the heavenly horse’s remote descendant. If there really is a family resemblance between the breeds, you can see where the legends came from. With its long lines and oil-slick iridescence, the Akhal-Teke looks fae and almost unsettling.

Zooming back some two or three thousand years, the original blood-sweating horses were bred by nomadic herders in Central Asia—a group known, at various times and in various contexts, as the Yuezhi, Kushana, or Tukhara. The horses were so desirable that Emperor Wu, who ruled China’s Han Dynasty from 141 to 87 BC, launched a series of military campaigns to Ferghana (present-day Uzbekistan) to acquire them. The “War of the Heavenly Horses,” as it’s now known, consumed twelve years and countless lives; in the process, Wu greatly expanded the reaches of his empire. As James C. Y. Watt writes, “there is general agreement that [Emperor Wu] need not have advanced as far as Ferghana,” but the “steppe horse” was a huge draw and would become “a superior mount for the cavalry.”

When the horses were finally brought more peacefully to China by the ruler of Ferghana, songs and poems were composed to celebrate:

The horse of heaven has come
From the regions of the West
Trampling shifting sands
And the barbarians of the nine directions have submitted.

The horse of heaven has come
Out of the waters of springs
Like a tiger’s spine, double
Like a spirit, transforming itself.

Excellent horses had obvious military use, given the constant conflict with nomadic groups. But there was more to the desire than that. The predominant theory of kingship at the time held that the emperor ruled for as long as he held the mandate of Heaven, and Heaven’s will had a tendency to express itself through xiangrui, or auspicious signs—often in the form of fantastical creatures.

As art historian Wu Hung writes in “A Sanpan Shan Chariot Ornament and the Xiangrui Design in Western Han Art,” when the emperor received “Heaven’s mandate,” he

became sovereign and father of all earth under Heaven. Thereafter, the emperor could give orders to ministers, fathers could give orders to children, men to women, and so forth until the entire social structure was completed. The first link in this social structure, that between Heaven and Emperor, was the most important and the most difficult to justify. As Heaven was believed to communicate with people on earth through xiangrui, the appearances of xiangrui seemed to cement the first link in the chain of relationship.

These signs recur throughout the annals of early Chinese history: unicorns; phoenixes; albino fish with red characters inscribed on their faces; dragons and turtles with mysterious inscriptions on their backs; iridescent earthworms; and more.

Political power struggles could play out, therefore, in coded form, through arguments over the interpretation of signs. As we can see from the seventh-century BCE words of one Kuan Chung, quoted by art historian Jerome Silbergeld, criticism of a regime could sound as if it was taken from a naturalist’s notebook:

Paired phoenixes and the luan-bird do not descend, while flocks of eagles and barn-owls flourish and the host of divine spirits does not appear…. Timely rains and sweet dew do not descend, whirlwinds and storms come frequently.

In this light, the War of the Heavenly Horses can be seen as a multipurpose affair: the arrival of the semi-legendary horses  wouldn’t just invigorate China’s cavalry but shore up the emperor’s legitimacy at the same time. Something of the same project can be inferred behind the creation of Shanglin Park, a vast hunting grounds where Emperor Wu housed fabulous creatures he collected from the furthest reaches of the empire—not just blood-sweating heavenly horses, but ostriches, rhinoceroses, and unicorns—even a massive tree of coral that was said to glow in the dark.

A poem of the era describes the park as a kind of microcosm where one could run through grass in the dead of winter and walk on frozen streams in the middle of summer. While expanding the reaches of his empire abroad, at home he recreated the world he aspired to conquer as a kind of miniature toy.

Editor’s note: This story was updated to add a missing link in the final paragraph.

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