On the northern slope of Mount Jiuzong, about 70 kilometers from the Tang dynasty capital of Chang’an, once stood six horses in stone. Long known as the Six Horses of Zhaoling, the mausoleum of Emperor Taizong (598–649), they were carved as relief on large stone panels, each roughly life-sized in presence and mounted originally on stone pedestals. Why are they there and what do they stand for?

The Six Horses of Zhaoling belong to a longer history of animals in Chinese funerary art. Animals have acted as powerful agents in tombs. A tomb was not merely a container for objects, but a concealed world made for the departed. Within that world, animals furnished an afterlife by providing food, protection, companionship, status, and passage across realms beyond ordinary human reach.

Sacrificial Animals

Archaeological excavations and oracle bone inscriptions show that animals were central to political and religious life in Bronze Age China. In the political realm, royal hunting joined violence, warfare, and kingship. In ritual settings, animal sacrifice created a channel between the living and the deceased. Through slaughter, offering, and consumption, animals were transformed into food for spirits, signs of devotion, and media through which the living sought protection and support from the ancestors.

In the Bronze Age burial sites, domestic animals such as dogs and pigs were often buried individually as complete animals. Towards the late Shang period (c. 1300-1046 BCE), sacrificial practice became more varied, with different animal species appearing in distinct ritual contexts. This shift suggests that animal sacrifice was also tied to systems of management and control. Animals that required more labor, organization, and restricted access could become stronger markers of rank and authority.

Unlike pigs and dogs, which had much longer histories in local domestic life, horses appear relatively late in the sacrificial practices. Large burial pits with horses and chariots were excavated from the elite tombs in Yinxu, the capital of the Shang dynasty. Their presence points to broader contacts between the Yellow River region, western Asia and the Eurasian steppe. Furthermore, the large number of sacrificed horses in a tomb, ranging from ten to thirty, evoked a sense of military power, elite networks, and the ability of the dead to continue moving through the world.

Spiritual Animals

By the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220), this idea of movement after death became part of a broader funerary imagination. Animals were no longer only sacrificed and buried as possessions for the dead. They could also help construct the world that the dead would enter and transform. Han tombs often imagined the afterlife as a microcosm that joined earthly residence, cosmic order, sacred mountains, and the realm of immortality. A small object such as a boshan incense burner makes this idea especially vivid. Its lid rises like a miniature mountain, while animals and fantastic creatures move among the peaks. When incense smoke drifted through the openings, the object projects an animated scene of the immortal realm.

The tomb of Huo Qubing (140–117 BCE) expands this miniature logic to a monumental scale. Huo was a military general celebrated for his campaigns against the Xiongnu, and his burial mound was said to have been shaped like the Qilian Mountains—the frontier landscape associated with his victories. Around this artificial mountain stood a group of stone sculptures in animal forms. The most famous work, commonly known as Horse Trampling the Xiongnu, conveys a clear message of conquest and imperial expansion. Yet the larger group of stone animals suggests something different. Like the creatures on the incense burner, they transformed the mound into an inhabited landscape. During this period, the imperial court was deeply invested in immortality and alchemy. The tomb became a place where the memory of frontier warfare merged with a vision of the otherworld.

Commemorative Animals

In Medieval China, exotic animals entered the cultural imagination through diplomacy, trade, warfare, and religion. Camels, evoked the Silk Road and the movement of goods and people across deserts and oasis towns; elephants arrived at the imperial court as diplomatic gifts from Southeast Asia, while ivory circulated as prestigious materials; ostriches, brought from Africa via Persian envoys, were absorbed into Chinese categories of auspicious birds. Together these animals remind people of their participation in a vast, interconnected world.

In the aristocratic tombs of the early Tang dynasty (618–907), horses and other animals frequently appeared in murals. These painted images helped transform the burial space into a site of memory and an afterlife residence, where the deceased’s spirit could continue to reside. In the tomb of Li Yong (687–727), polo players and mounted hunters evoke activities associated with aristocratic life, physical skill, and courtly leisure. Mounted attendants process through the tomb passage, while saddled horses wait near the gates, ready to carry the tomb resident beyond the palace compound.

For the Six Horses of Zhaoling, they were not generic steeds but war chargers associated with emperor Taizong’s major military campaigns. The horses’ names preserve traces of Inner Asian language, revealing the multilingual world of the early Tang dynasty. According to You Shixiong’s (1037-1097) research, the stone horses were originally paired with carved eulogies composed by the emperor. For Telebiao, with which Taizong fought in the campaign against Song Jingang in 620, the eulogy reads:

Responding to the whip, it soared into the air; bearing its fame, it rose halfway to the Milky Way. At Heaven’s passes it crushed the enemy; through danger, it carried him across peril.

Instead of narrating full battles, this literary format compresses the horses’ key characteristics and critical moments into lapidary phrases. These eulogies also connect the horses to portrait tradition, in which the subject’s achievements and virtues were praised. In the imperial court, projects such as the Portraits of Meritorious Officials at Lingyan Pavilion similarly transformed loyal service into a lasting visual record. By applying this human-centered commemorative format to named animals, the Six Horses were personified as loyal retainers and participants in the founding of the dynasty.

Coda

What would the afterlife have looked like without animals? Across the tombs and monuments discussed in this essay, animals were not merely symbols onto which humans projected ideas. Through their bodily capacities and longstanding relationships with people, they shape the conditions and possibilities for human practices without being intentional co-designers of these funerary worlds. In the case of the Six Horses of Zhaoling, the horses’ physical capacities and their bonds with Emperor Taizong enabled a distinctive form of imperial commemoration. The history of Chinese funerary art is therefore not only a history of how people represented animals, but also how ideas about life and death took shape through enduring relationships between humans and animals.

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Cite this Article as

Mengge Cao, “Horses in Stone, Life on the Edge: Animals in Chinese Funerary Art,” in “The Six Horses of Zhaoling Digital Restoration,” Dispersed Chinese Art Digitization Project, 17/07/2026, https://caea.lib.uchicago.edu/dcadp/en/sixhorses/funeraryart/.

Further Readings

• Schafer, Edward H. The Golden Peaches of Samarkand A Study of T'ang Exotics. University of California Press, 1985.
• Sterckx, Roel. “Animal to Edible: The Ritualization of Animals in Early China.” In Animals through Chinese History, 1st ed., edited by Roel Sterckx, Martina Siebert, and Dagmar Schäfer. Cambridge University Press, 2018.
• Silbergeld, Jerome, and Eugene Yuejin Wang, eds. The Zoomorphic Imagination in Chinese Art and Culture. University of Hawaiʻi Press, 2016.
• Wu, Hung. Art of the Yellow Springs: Understanding Chinese Tombs. University of Chicago Press, 2015.
• Zhou, Xiuqin. Creation and Separation: A Chinese Emperor’s Six Stone Horses. University of Pennsylvania Museum. 2024.
• 陈文芝，“文与诗的合而分：论唐代写真赞之文体承变.” 杜甫研究学刊 162. 4 (2024): 102–114。
• 葛承雍，“唐昭陵六骏与突厥葬俗研究”, 中华文史论丛 60 (1999): 182–209。
• 罗新， “昔日太宗拳毛騧 ——唐与突厥的骏马制名传统.” 有所不为的反叛者：批判, 怀疑与想象力. 上海三联书店, 2019。
• 庄家会，“霍去病墓雕刻原境初探.” 故宮博物院院刊 248. 12 (2022): 69–82。