A good horse was good fortune incarnate
June 9, 2020 9:55 PM Subscribe
Uh... Yes. The song are more iconically Chinese than the liao.
How did you even come to the belief that the liao were Chinese?
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 5:35 AM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
How did you even come to the belief that the liao were Chinese?
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 5:35 AM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
Seriously, wtf.
Do I come into threads about the Mexican American war asking why the Americans were more American than the Mexicans?
Actually, that's a bad example. There's actually a bit of a dispute there.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 5:37 AM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
Do I come into threads about the Mexican American war asking why the Americans were more American than the Mexicans?
Actually, that's a bad example. There's actually a bit of a dispute there.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 5:37 AM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
Okay, I pulled out my laptop to type this.
The question of which peoples were Chinese and not is complicated, and I'm really not qualified to explain it, but here's my best try.
Most obviously, it's not that there was a unique China at any moment. See, e.g., Spring and Autumn Period, Warring States Period, or, you know, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. (These terms all make good Google queries.)
The answer about "non-Han people" is closer, but with a couple of caveats:
First, we're talking about the people, not the rulers. China has had several "conquest dynasties" (another good Google term) established by foreign invaders. But their subjects were Chinese, and they themselves adopted Chinese mores.
Second, "Han" is, like all racial categorizations, a construction. E.g., the Han were a caste in the Yuan dynasty which included the people we would now call Han but also included the Khitans. (The Liao were a Khitan civilization.)
Third, the idea of biological race is an anachronism. Biological race was imported from the west later. At the time, Chinese people would certainly have recognized differences in physical features but they mostly cared about the hua/yi distinction (good Google term). The hua were civilized, the yi were not, and one could become hua by adopting more civilized ways.
(Fun fact: one of the concessions after the Second Opium War was that China stop referring to the four nations as yi in official documents. The Brits really didn't like being called uncivilized.)
So actually "non-Han people" is not a perfect answer either.
I suspect (historians are welcome to correct me) the only real explanation for what we call Chinese and what we don't is political expediency. It's a valuable propaganda tool for a new regime to describe itself as making China great again, speaking for real Chinese people, etc.
Anyway, the comment I originally came to post:
That was a great read. I had heard the story of the guy and his horse, of course, but my parents were mostly interested in the moral of the story and not the historical context. It's fascinating to learn how the details of this timeless fable are actually specific to a particular time and place.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 7:00 AM on June 10, 2020 [41 favorites]
The question of which peoples were Chinese and not is complicated, and I'm really not qualified to explain it, but here's my best try.
Most obviously, it's not that there was a unique China at any moment. See, e.g., Spring and Autumn Period, Warring States Period, or, you know, Romance of the Three Kingdoms. (These terms all make good Google queries.)
The answer about "non-Han people" is closer, but with a couple of caveats:
First, we're talking about the people, not the rulers. China has had several "conquest dynasties" (another good Google term) established by foreign invaders. But their subjects were Chinese, and they themselves adopted Chinese mores.
Second, "Han" is, like all racial categorizations, a construction. E.g., the Han were a caste in the Yuan dynasty which included the people we would now call Han but also included the Khitans. (The Liao were a Khitan civilization.)
Third, the idea of biological race is an anachronism. Biological race was imported from the west later. At the time, Chinese people would certainly have recognized differences in physical features but they mostly cared about the hua/yi distinction (good Google term). The hua were civilized, the yi were not, and one could become hua by adopting more civilized ways.
(Fun fact: one of the concessions after the Second Opium War was that China stop referring to the four nations as yi in official documents. The Brits really didn't like being called uncivilized.)
So actually "non-Han people" is not a perfect answer either.
I suspect (historians are welcome to correct me) the only real explanation for what we call Chinese and what we don't is political expediency. It's a valuable propaganda tool for a new regime to describe itself as making China great again, speaking for real Chinese people, etc.
Anyway, the comment I originally came to post:
That was a great read. I had heard the story of the guy and his horse, of course, but my parents were mostly interested in the moral of the story and not the historical context. It's fascinating to learn how the details of this timeless fable are actually specific to a particular time and place.
posted by meaty shoe puppet at 7:00 AM on June 10, 2020 [41 favorites]
Tremendously interesting. The thing that stuck out for me was the difficulty for the Chinese state in ensuring it had enough horses: they eat plants and literally breed, it's a huge well-organised country, what can be hard about that? But no, it was hard: and I see parallels in modern state failures to achieve goals that looks to be central to the state but prove impossible to do well (reducing pollution, providing healthcare, weapons procurement) and find that terribly interesting. Wicked problems, politics, always there.
posted by alasdair at 7:05 AM on June 10, 2020 [5 favorites]
posted by alasdair at 7:05 AM on June 10, 2020 [5 favorites]
Fascinating article. For those who like their history wrapped in fiction, Guy Gavriel Kay has a novel set during the Tang Dynasty (the one preceding the Song Dynasty) that revolves around a veteran and poet being gifted 250 Ferghana horses & what sort of political machinations that sets off. Under Heaven is a fun, quick read. The follow-up, River of Stars, is a nice précis on the border wars of the Song Dynasty.
posted by sobell at 7:31 AM on June 10, 2020 [4 favorites]
posted by sobell at 7:31 AM on June 10, 2020 [4 favorites]
I was just proud of myself for remembering that the Ferghana horses were the really good ones. (I kept remembering pieces to share here from my long-ago but very China-heavy high school world history course, but then the article would helpfully provide those bits of context again: like the Song controlling a much smaller piece of land than the Tang, for example.) For some additional helpful connection to other FPPs, the Ferghana horses were the ancestors of today's modern Akhal Teke breed.
The proposed one-horse-per-ten-households system is incredibly fascinating from the perspective of keeping the animals, too. Horses are social creatures, and tend to do better when not kept in isolation; was the Song population density at the time such that small groups of horses might be shared among multiple ten-household collectives? How was breeding meant to proceed--if your share-horse is a mare, can you afford to have her off work to breed, and who looks after the colt after it is weaned? Who decides what mares are put to which studs?
It reminds me of the way that dog breeding is often conducted now in the US, where a single breeder often disperses breeding stock to many households under contracts that say that the breeder has the right to bring the pet bitch home to breed her a few times over her life, but otherwise the dog is kept as a pet by the main household. In exchange, the host household pays a much smaller fee for the puppy or sometimes no fee at all, and the breeder has access to a wider range of dogs to breed without being responsible for actually taking care of them day to day.
Of course, that system is primarily popular because the cost of keeping enough dogs to work with is high, especially if one intends to not cycle through too many dogs in one's own household too quickly or use the same dogs too many times. If the notion is to maintain a quickly accessible state military supply of horses, it seems that there would be a lot of flaws in the system, even if it is cheaper than maintaining state studs in the short term and helps to avoid inbreeding and crowding. Assuming that the host households weren't the people making the breeding decisions, I can see the scheme failing for completely different reasons: how quickly would the horses be able to be reclaimed? How willing are the peasant host households to relinquish the useful horses? What are the odds of illicit breeding of farmed-out mares and colts going missing? (What happens if the colt "dies" and everyone pays the fine, but really a weaned colt was just hidden from the inspector?) Are they farming out stallions or just mares? How quickly does breeding proceed under these circumstances?
It's almost a shame that political maneuvering killed the notion so easily, because I can see a lot of interesting paths that such a scheme might have taken. I can also see it working if some care was taken with the farmed-out horses used in the program: if for example you sent ungelded colts to these households only, and pulled the stallions back on a rotated basis to use at the local state stud, with a number of these studs dispersed throughout the country. It would certainly help with the inbreeding issue while also allowing the military to retain control of the general breeding of the military animals, and as a bonus might well improve the stock of any locals who can privately acquire any sort of horses outside the program.
posted by sciatrix at 9:02 AM on June 10, 2020 [7 favorites]
The proposed one-horse-per-ten-households system is incredibly fascinating from the perspective of keeping the animals, too. Horses are social creatures, and tend to do better when not kept in isolation; was the Song population density at the time such that small groups of horses might be shared among multiple ten-household collectives? How was breeding meant to proceed--if your share-horse is a mare, can you afford to have her off work to breed, and who looks after the colt after it is weaned? Who decides what mares are put to which studs?
It reminds me of the way that dog breeding is often conducted now in the US, where a single breeder often disperses breeding stock to many households under contracts that say that the breeder has the right to bring the pet bitch home to breed her a few times over her life, but otherwise the dog is kept as a pet by the main household. In exchange, the host household pays a much smaller fee for the puppy or sometimes no fee at all, and the breeder has access to a wider range of dogs to breed without being responsible for actually taking care of them day to day.
Of course, that system is primarily popular because the cost of keeping enough dogs to work with is high, especially if one intends to not cycle through too many dogs in one's own household too quickly or use the same dogs too many times. If the notion is to maintain a quickly accessible state military supply of horses, it seems that there would be a lot of flaws in the system, even if it is cheaper than maintaining state studs in the short term and helps to avoid inbreeding and crowding. Assuming that the host households weren't the people making the breeding decisions, I can see the scheme failing for completely different reasons: how quickly would the horses be able to be reclaimed? How willing are the peasant host households to relinquish the useful horses? What are the odds of illicit breeding of farmed-out mares and colts going missing? (What happens if the colt "dies" and everyone pays the fine, but really a weaned colt was just hidden from the inspector?) Are they farming out stallions or just mares? How quickly does breeding proceed under these circumstances?
It's almost a shame that political maneuvering killed the notion so easily, because I can see a lot of interesting paths that such a scheme might have taken. I can also see it working if some care was taken with the farmed-out horses used in the program: if for example you sent ungelded colts to these households only, and pulled the stallions back on a rotated basis to use at the local state stud, with a number of these studs dispersed throughout the country. It would certainly help with the inbreeding issue while also allowing the military to retain control of the general breeding of the military animals, and as a bonus might well improve the stock of any locals who can privately acquire any sort of horses outside the program.
posted by sciatrix at 9:02 AM on June 10, 2020 [7 favorites]
A song for the occasion ------ Tucker Zimmerman- Taoist Tale
posted by albion moonlight at 4:51 PM on June 10, 2020
posted by albion moonlight at 4:51 PM on June 10, 2020
The official Wang Anshi mentioned in the article is one of the most controversial historical figures in that period. The reforms he proposed were hugely ambitious, and horses were only a small part of it. His proposed policies appeared in Chinese high school history exams often.
And to refer back to the question of Song vs. Liao, and which peoples were considered Chinese, I'd like to add that language plays a big part. The Liao nation had their own language which later died out; Song people used 'classical Chinese'.
posted by of strange foe at 6:27 PM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
And to refer back to the question of Song vs. Liao, and which peoples were considered Chinese, I'd like to add that language plays a big part. The Liao nation had their own language which later died out; Song people used 'classical Chinese'.
posted by of strange foe at 6:27 PM on June 10, 2020 [2 favorites]
How did you even come to the belief that the liao were Chinese?
It seemed a natural assumption. The article says “Liao encompassed a large area of what is now northern China (including Beijing)”. I actually know a Chinese family whose surname is Liao. Why should I have thought differently?
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:40 PM on June 10, 2020
It seemed a natural assumption. The article says “Liao encompassed a large area of what is now northern China (including Beijing)”. I actually know a Chinese family whose surname is Liao. Why should I have thought differently?
posted by Joe in Australia at 6:40 PM on June 10, 2020
Well, it's approximately like listening to someone mention the Holy Roman Empire in conversation with a map and immediately demanding to know why the HRE was GERMAN and not Italian even though Romans are Italian.
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't do that because most of us get rather a lot of European history if we get any history at all, so we have a fairly good sense for when there's enough continuity of power in certain places to call one regime a descendant of another. We know that Brittany is part of France now, not Britain, if we see it on a map.
But Anglophones tend to do a bad job at educating or children (and, through pop culture, ourselves) on history from any other continents... Even though we expect that folks from other cultural backgrounds should definitely have that sense of continuity for European history. Children are raised on lore of Rome and Greece.
The thing is, China's history as the seat of an empire is longer than any other can boast. I remember it so well in that World History course because there was always something important happening in China that we needed to be aware of. China's history is continuous; the dynasties and empires that occupied the homeland of most of the people who call themselves Chinese today still used the same population centers, similar language groups, culturally continuous concepts, etc.
You can only get a feeling for world history if you pay attention to big local power centers, but in Eurasia we tend to ignore large chunks of the continent entirely during our education. For example, the cycle of mounted conquerors out of the steppes riding out and beginning new dynasties of conquerors is fundamental to the pulse of Eurasian history, like a two hundred year heartbeat. And the thing is, the Western-European only perspectives we get are like trying to understand the nature of an object dropped into a pool by seeing the little chaotic ripples at the tips of the opposite end of the pool. By contrast, Chinese empires nestled cheek by jowl with the steppes riders and so usually responded to them much more strongly.
Europe isn't as disconnected from Asia in culture and history as it pretends, but that pretense has a long legacy of racism and colonialism behind it. I imagine it is quite wearing to constantly run into that absence of cultural education in discussions of one's own cultural heritage.
posted by sciatrix at 9:42 PM on June 10, 2020 [17 favorites]
I'm pretty sure you wouldn't do that because most of us get rather a lot of European history if we get any history at all, so we have a fairly good sense for when there's enough continuity of power in certain places to call one regime a descendant of another. We know that Brittany is part of France now, not Britain, if we see it on a map.
But Anglophones tend to do a bad job at educating or children (and, through pop culture, ourselves) on history from any other continents... Even though we expect that folks from other cultural backgrounds should definitely have that sense of continuity for European history. Children are raised on lore of Rome and Greece.
The thing is, China's history as the seat of an empire is longer than any other can boast. I remember it so well in that World History course because there was always something important happening in China that we needed to be aware of. China's history is continuous; the dynasties and empires that occupied the homeland of most of the people who call themselves Chinese today still used the same population centers, similar language groups, culturally continuous concepts, etc.
You can only get a feeling for world history if you pay attention to big local power centers, but in Eurasia we tend to ignore large chunks of the continent entirely during our education. For example, the cycle of mounted conquerors out of the steppes riding out and beginning new dynasties of conquerors is fundamental to the pulse of Eurasian history, like a two hundred year heartbeat. And the thing is, the Western-European only perspectives we get are like trying to understand the nature of an object dropped into a pool by seeing the little chaotic ripples at the tips of the opposite end of the pool. By contrast, Chinese empires nestled cheek by jowl with the steppes riders and so usually responded to them much more strongly.
Europe isn't as disconnected from Asia in culture and history as it pretends, but that pretense has a long legacy of racism and colonialism behind it. I imagine it is quite wearing to constantly run into that absence of cultural education in discussions of one's own cultural heritage.
posted by sciatrix at 9:42 PM on June 10, 2020 [17 favorites]
I was hoping for more of a description of what made a good war horse. It's hard to judge by the historical illustrations, but those images would lead me guess that they were more of a draft-like breed (given the absolutely massive hindquarters/hips/loins/flanks), but then that doesn't lend itself to "'blood-sweating horse.' Famous for their impressive endurance over long distances" description which would (to my mind) mean a lighter more Arab-like horse. From what little I've seen of Asian statues, the figures tend to have a beefier, draftier build, but again, that just could be the preferred aesthetic styling of the time.
posted by sardonyx at 10:37 AM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by sardonyx at 10:37 AM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
I'm curious about that, too. The statues of medieval Chinese blood horses look more like Percherons than any kind of steppe horse I'm familiar with, and certainly they don't resemble the lean Akhal-Teke much. I really wonder whether there are any good contemporary illustrations of bad Chinese horseflesh to use as a barometer, but I have no idea how to go about looking for it.
posted by sciatrix at 10:46 AM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
posted by sciatrix at 10:46 AM on June 11, 2020 [2 favorites]
Also, I vaguely remember hearing about spotted Ferghana horses a lot as a kid reading about the Silk Road. That... does not square with the modern Tekes, either. Upon googling, I'm mostly seeing that repeated by Appaloosa people who are fixated on the LP complex, but I tend to take breed fancy history with several grains of salt. They tend to follow the LP complex directly into the Spanish cavalry and jennet breeding traditions, without really sketching out how or when the horseflesh moved so far west.
While I was digging into that, I found this interesting piece on a wealthy Chinese man breeding Akhal-Tekes explicitly as a call-back to Chinese national history (although somewhat older than the Song period described in this article). It's particularly interesting to me because the Turkmenistan dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, used the Akhal-Teke horses as a sort of banner of national pride and a diplomatic currency for years as well--and these horses seem to have largely been imported from Turkemenistan. But the Ferghana valley isn't actually located in Turkmenistan. It's about a hundred miles east and sort of jointly owned at this point by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. It's just that none of those countries, to my knowledge, have made horse-breeding such a nationalistic past-time and cast such a pall of, hm, national ownership over horse breeds.
It sort of reminds me of the politics re: what is a Lusitano vs an Andalusian.
posted by sciatrix at 11:07 AM on June 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
While I was digging into that, I found this interesting piece on a wealthy Chinese man breeding Akhal-Tekes explicitly as a call-back to Chinese national history (although somewhat older than the Song period described in this article). It's particularly interesting to me because the Turkmenistan dictator, Saparmurat Niyazov, used the Akhal-Teke horses as a sort of banner of national pride and a diplomatic currency for years as well--and these horses seem to have largely been imported from Turkemenistan. But the Ferghana valley isn't actually located in Turkmenistan. It's about a hundred miles east and sort of jointly owned at this point by Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan, and Tajikistan. It's just that none of those countries, to my knowledge, have made horse-breeding such a nationalistic past-time and cast such a pall of, hm, national ownership over horse breeds.
It sort of reminds me of the politics re: what is a Lusitano vs an Andalusian.
posted by sciatrix at 11:07 AM on June 11, 2020 [3 favorites]
but those images would lead me guess that they were more of a draft-like breed (given the absolutely massive hindquarters/hips/loins/flanks)
If the rider was wearing heavy armor and weaponry (as it seems they did), the horse must have been a heavier type than the modern Akhal-Teke horses. I looked a lot at those pictures and imagined that the strategy was to cross breed imported light stallions for speed and endurance with more sturdy local mares for strength and a calm temper. Way back in time I knew a girl who had a horse that was half Norwegian Fjord Horse, and half Arab, and it actually looked a lot like these Chinese war horses, with a somewhat impractical lack of definition around the shoulder and withers, and a very round hind quarter. It was a lovely horse, though, because of its good temper and boundless skills.
posted by mumimor at 11:43 AM on June 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
If the rider was wearing heavy armor and weaponry (as it seems they did), the horse must have been a heavier type than the modern Akhal-Teke horses. I looked a lot at those pictures and imagined that the strategy was to cross breed imported light stallions for speed and endurance with more sturdy local mares for strength and a calm temper. Way back in time I knew a girl who had a horse that was half Norwegian Fjord Horse, and half Arab, and it actually looked a lot like these Chinese war horses, with a somewhat impractical lack of definition around the shoulder and withers, and a very round hind quarter. It was a lovely horse, though, because of its good temper and boundless skills.
posted by mumimor at 11:43 AM on June 11, 2020 [4 favorites]
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posted by Joe in Australia at 2:09 AM on June 10, 2020