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."
"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.
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.
