Turning a Rough Ride into a 'Golden Bridle'

Instead of flogging a dead horse, underappreciated aesthetes of yore chose to paint living ones instead, Zhao Xu reports.

No period in Chinese history hungered for talent more than the Warring States Period (475-221 BC) — a turbulent era, as its name suggests, in which rival states battled for survival and dominion. That relentless struggle would culminate in 221 BC, when Ying Zheng, the king of the state of Qin, subdued all his competitors to unify China for the first time.

That hunger survives in the pages of Zhan Guo Ce (Strategies of the Warring States), a collection of political maneuvers, diplomatic ploys and battlefield intrigues compiled around the first century BC. Among its best-known anecdotes is one concerning a horse — a dead one.

To revive his weakened state of Yan, King Zhao (335-279 BC) asked his adviser Guo Wei how to draw capable men. Guo replied with a parable: a man once paid 500 gold pieces for the skull of a dead horse; when others heard, they assumed he would pay even more for a living one and soon arrived in droves with fine steeds. "If you hope to attract the worthy," Guo concluded, "begin by honoring even those of modest ability — greater talent will follow."

▲A painting by Huang Shen of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) shows the legendary horse judge Bo Le examining a steed. [Photo/Courtesy of the Palace Museum in Beijing]

"By then, the metaphorical link between a horse and human talent was firmly established," says Tan Zuowen, a scholar of ancient Chinese literature at Beijing's Capital Normal University. He points to two passages in Zhan Guo Ce about Bo Le — Chinese history's most renowned evaluator of horses — and the qianlima, "horses that can run 1,000 miles (in a day)".

"Only when there is a Bo Le does a qianlima appear" — so wrote the great Tang (618-907) thinker Han Yu (768-824) when he composed On Horses around 795, at a moment in his late 20s or early 30s when his career had stalled, despite his declared devotion to public service and his refusal to withdraw into seclusion.

Beneath Han's keen observations runs a current of mounting frustration — a mood shared by his younger contemporary Li He (790-816). A prodigy whose uncanny brilliance was immediately recognized by Han and others, Li poured his restless genius into a remarkable cycle of 23 horse poems, composed over just a few short years before his own life was cut short at 26.

▲Two horse figurines of Tang Dynasty (618-907) tricolored glazed porcelain shown at an exhibition in Shenzhen, Guangdong province. [Photo by Luo Hongxian/For China Daily]

In one of them, he becomes the horse itself and cries out: "The desert's sand lies white as snow; the Yanshan Mountains' moon curves like a bow. When shall I wear my golden bridle, and race at full speed through autumn's glow?" The lines resound with an aching desire to break free and achieve.

"With so many gifted individuals frustrated in their ambitions throughout history, it is little wonder that countless painters and poets turned to the horse," says Pang Ou, an expert on ancient Chinese painting and calligraphy and former director of the Department of Ancient Art at the Nanjing Museum.

"In its image, they found a vessel for wounded pride and quiet protest — a way to voice grievance and to hint, however faintly, at their own longing to be recognized at last as the qianlima they believed themselves to be."

Those who held power, meanwhile, were often tempted to see themselves as Bo Le awaiting the arrival of a yet-unfound qianlima. Among them was Emperor Qianlong (1711-1799) of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), who invoked the famed judge repeatedly in his poetry, expressing his desire for a talent worthy of his discernment.

▲A handscroll depicting three horses by their grooms, painted respectively by Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368) master Zhao Mengfu (right), his son Zhao Yong (middle) and grandson Zhao Lin. [Photo/Courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art]

Within the emperor's vast collection of ancient paintings and calligraphy — much of it preserved from earlier dynasties — were numerous depictions of horses. Among them were works by Zhao Mengfu (1254-1322), widely regarded as the greatest painter-calligrapher of the Yuan Dynasty (1271-1368), a regime founded by the Mongols, whose deep-rooted equestrian traditions made the horse an indispensable factor in political, military and social life.

While inscribing one of Zhao's horse paintings — Qianlong being the ardent and often relentless inscriber he always was — the emperor ventured into a kind of gentle psychoanalysis. "When the master painted a horse, he became the horse," he wrote. "Why, then, did he stop painting them in his later years? Not from any waning of skill, but for the sole reason that one cannot fully behold oneself."

▲Horse-riding gear unearthed from a tomb dating back to the Liao Dynasty (916-1125). [Photo provided to China Daily]

Whether Zhao would have agreed with this assessment is impossible to know, but one thing is for sure: his passion for painting horses carried on through his descendants. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York holds a long handscroll depicting three horses, each attended by its groom — painted not at once, but across three generations, by the master, his son Zhao Yong, and his grandson Zhao Lin. Together, they form a singular visual legacy spanning 63 years, bound by lineage and a shared devotion to the horse as an artistic subject.

According to Joseph Scheier-Dolberg, the museum's associate curator of Chinese painting, during the early Yuan Dynasty, the ruling Mongols restricted the roles available to Han scholar-officials — the ethnic majority in China. In this context, the motif became a veiled appeal for the proper recognition and use of literati talent. Zhao Mengfu created the painting for a high-ranking Surveillance Commissioner, who may have been a government recruiter.

Steeped in calligraphy and classical learning, Zhao Mengfu rendered his horses as vehicles of literati introspection, where temperament, brushwork and self-cultivation took precedence, expressed with scholarly restraint. Su Shi (1037-1101), a towering figure two centuries earlier and a kindred spirit to Zhao Mengfu, once observed that judging a true literati painting is like assessing fine horses: what matters is not surface detail, but the surge of spirit and the sweep of intention.

▲Horse-riding gear unearthed from a tomb dating back to the Liao Dynasty (916-1125). [Photo provided to China Daily]

That understanding of spirit has remained relevant across eras. During China's reform and opening-up, when the nation relearned how to move forward after decades of constraint, progress relied not only on policy or technology, but on inner drive — initiative, adaptability and the confidence to proceed without precedents.

In today's China, shaped by rapid urbanization, digital transformation and global exchange, the same principle quietly persists. What carries people forward is not mere spectacle but an accumulated sense of direction. As systems grow more complex and change accelerates, qianlima— individuals of insight, creativity and resolve — are needed more than ever. To recognize, nurture and trust such talent is no longer a poetic ideal, but a practical necessity.

Thirteen centuries earlier, Li Bai (701–762), a radiant figure of China's poetic golden age, sketched a vivid portrait of qianlima, capturing their unrestrained spirit in verse as free and exuberant as the horses themselves:

"It neighs into blue heavens, tossing its green-bristled mane;

With orchid-tough sinews and wondrous strength,

It runs and vanishes like a flame."