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Blood-Sweating Steeds. The paintings admired by Confucius in his day have long since disappeared. But lessons passed on by the old masters can still be seen in the paintings and sculpture of the vigorous, expansive T'ang Dynasty, which ruled from 618 through 906, conquered an empire that stretched east to Korea and westward to the borders of Persia.
The secret weapons of the fierce T'ang cavalry were their powerful Bactrian steeds, by legend so mettlesome that they literally sweated blood. The artist who most magnificently portrayed them was the painter Han Kan. Summoned to court by T'ang Emperor Ming Huang, Han was ordered to study the paintings of one of the court painters, took the "Illustrious Sovereign" aback by replying: "My masters are all in Your Majesty's stables." The results of Han's study of the Emperor's 40,000 horses can be seen in his Cowherd (opposite), a painting that for countless generations has epitomized for the Chinese the essential nature of the horse.
Emperor Ming Huang was also a great lover of nature. Homesick for mountains, he one day ordered two of his painters to reproduce the scenery of the Kialing Valley. Artist Wu Tao-tzu went out to lie under the trees, listen to the murmuring streams. Then, having identified himself with the scene, he took his brush, dashed off One Hundred Miles of the Kialing River Valley in a single day. Artist Li Ssu-hsun, who was also a general in the Emperor's army, labored for long months to depict the same scene. Presented to the Emperor, both paintings were judged "excellent in the extreme."
Neither painting in the competition has survived, but both the followers of Wu and General Li can be traced throughout Chinese painting history. And some idea of what Li's painstaking rendition looked like can be got from a work of the general's son, Li Chao-tao (known as the "Little General"). Travelers in a Mountain Pass (opposite], a rare, 1,000-year-old painting on silk, is believed to be his. Done in metallic blues and greens, it creates a panorama of cloud-shrouded peaks and gorges against which is shown a group of horsemen and camels, led by a red-coated figure that may be Emperor Ming Huang himself. In the foreground, pack asses roll in the grass, while the column winds slowly ahead in a procession that ushers into Chinese art the great theme of the all-engulfing landscape.
The Truth of Heaven. Vast and towering landscapes, of such magnitude that they dwarfed all signs of man within them, became the aspiration and great achievement of the painters who followed under the Sung emperors (960-1279 A.D.). The greatest of them, Tung Yuan, shows in his Dragon Among the Country People the mighty forward leap taken by the Sung artists over their earlier T'ang models. Tung Yuan's eagle's-eye view depicts the mountains, lakes and plains that he saw in Kiangnan, laid out in one majestic sweep that reaches to the horizon. In its vastness, human figures are reduced to mere dots of color. To his contemporaries, and to generations after, such scenes appeared as "the very truth of Heaven."