China

The Met's Sancai Horse 1991.253.12: A Tang Mingqi

In Gallery 207 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art a cream-and-amber earthenware horse stands four-square, just under seventy-five centimetres high. The Chinese title on the record is 唐 三彩陶馬: a Tang three-colour pottery horse. The object number is 1991.253.12. It looks ready for a courtyard. It was made to go underground.

A Tang sancai horse is a glazed earthenware mingqi, a spirit good for a tomb. It is not a Qin terracotta-army mount and it is not bronze. Why spend copper green and iron amber on a figure the living would seal in a shaft?

Sancai, 三彩, and a horse that is not bronze

Sancai (三彩) means "three colours." The Smithsonian's National Museum of Asian Art gives the usual set as yellow or amber, green, and creamy white. The base glaze is a transparent lead mix of lead oxide, silica, and alumina, fired at a low temperature. Copper oxide turns it green. Iron oxide turns it amber or yellowish brown. Cobalt can add blue, but that mineral was expensive and uncommon.

The body is earthenware, often a pale clay with a white slip so the colours sit bright. Encyclopaedia Britannica places the main Tang three-colour kilns at Tongchuan near Chang'an and at Gongxian in Henan. Potters slipped the figure, then let the lead glaze run.

The standing type is easy to read. Four legs plant on a thin rectangular plinth. The head turns a little. The mouth is often ajar. Mane and tail take the amber run. Bridle, breast strap, and crupper can carry green, sometimes with leaf-shaped pendants. The saddle blanket mottles. That is clay and glaze, not bronze, and not a life-size Qin pit figure.

From Han spirit goods to Tang lead glaze

Britannica's mingqi entry calls these objects funerary furniture placed in tombs so the dead keep the material world they knew. The Met Heilbrunn essay by Heather Colburn Clydesdale uses the same English gloss, "spirit goods," and tracks the fashion from the Han dynasty (206 BCE to 220 CE) through the Six Dynasties (220–589) into the Sui (581–618) and Tang (618–907). Han tombs filled chambers with earthenware servants, animals, and farmyards in miniature. After the Han collapse, the number and quality of mingqi dropped. When China reunified, the kit came back with pack animals, guardians, and, in the Tang, three-colour glaze.

World History Encyclopedia notes that northern tombs liked ceramic people, horses, and camels, made in moulds and assembled. Britannica says the same: potters used moulds, then painted, glazed, or both. Seventh-century human figures tend to be slender. Eighth-century ones grow rounder as court fashion changed. Large glazed horses sit in that early Tang window. The Met dates 1991.253.12 to the late seventh century through the first half of the eighth.

A clay stand-in for a living rank

The afterlife, in this tomb logic, continues ordinary life. Clydesdale writes that Han thought split the person into po, which stayed with the body underground, and hun, which could rise. Rituals sometimes tried to keep both in the safer tomb. A horse in clay was transport for that household. Cleveland says as much on its own sancai horse: tombs were stocked with what the dead were thought to need, horses included.

The figure also spoke to the living. The Smithsonian page on a pair of riders says Tang sancai in tombs was limited by rank, and that number and size tracked the dead person's status. Cleveland's label is blunter: green, amber, and transparent white mark a high-ranking burial. Britannica records sumptuary laws that tried to cap how many figurines a funeral could use, and how large they could be. The laws did not hold.

Horses were not a casual subject. Clydesdale's Heilbrunn essay on Tang internationalism says western tribute horses were among the most valuable gifts a foreign court could send. A glazed stand-in borrowed that prestige when a living charger could not follow the coffin.

After the mid-eighth century the tomb horse thins out

Tang mingqi absorbed the guardian beasts and pack animals of the Northern and Southern Dynasties, then added the foreign faces, dancers, and grooms a Chang'an street could show. Sancai is the Tang signature on that kit. Clydesdale links the three-colour fashion to contact along the routes later called the Silk Road. Britannica's kiln account is more local: northern workshops developed three-colour (sancai) lead glaze and let it run. The taste for dripping colour grew in a capital that lived on western horses.

Then the supply of fine tomb figures fell. Britannica dates a sharp drop in quantity and quality in northern China after the middle of the eighth century. The Met horse sits in the late seventh century through the first half of the eighth. Cleveland's horse, 1955.295, is dated late 600s to 800 and is said to come from a procession set in a high-rank tomb, probably in Henan.

The Met's 1991.253.12 in Gallery 207

The clearest single object to study is the Metropolitan Museum's Horse, object 1991.253.12, on view in Gallery 207. The museum dates it to the late seventh century through the first half of the eighth, within the Tang dynasty (618–907). The medium is earthenware with three-colour (sancai) glaze and pigment. It stands 73.7 cm high, 81.3 cm wide, and 30.5 cm deep. Stanley Herzman gave it in 1991 in memory of Adele Herzman.

That is a large mingqi. Cleveland's comparable horse is 76.8 cm high, close enough to show the scale elite tombs wanted. The Met record does not print an excavation site. The Chinese title, 唐 三彩陶馬, is the type name: Tang, three colours, pottery, horse. The animal is a standing charger on a base, built to be seen in a chamber, not ridden. Pigment supplements the glaze on details the lead run would blur.

Lead glaze, lost tombs, and the terracotta mix-up

The chemistry is clearer than the findspots. The Smithsonian gives the firing band as 650 to 1000 degrees centigrade and treats Tang sancai as ware reserved for burial, seldom if ever used at the table. That answers the opening puzzle only in part. Colour still had to impress the funeral first. Rank was counted while the set was assembled.

Heilbrunn's Silk Road sentence and Britannica's kiln map do not tell the same story in the same order. Collection horses rarely name a tomb. Public collections hold many glazed horses. Almost none can be walked back to a named occupant.

The easy modern error is to file every Chinese clay horse under the terracotta army. Those Qin figures are earlier, life-size, and a different workshop tradition. A Tang sancai horse is smaller, lead-glazed, and made as mingqi for a ranked burial in the seventh or eighth century. The secure core is modest: earthenware, three-colour lead glaze, a tomb, and a horse that stood in for wealth the dead could no longer ride.

In your scene

A Tang sancai horse belongs in a tomb corridor or a funeral set, four-square on its plinth, not in a Qin pit and not as a bronze on a palace stair. Keep the cream body, the amber mane swept to one side, the docked amber tail, the amber saddle, and the green bridle with leaf-shaped pendants on the breast and crupper straps. The mottled green blanket and the slightly turned head with the mouth ajar are the type, not extra decoration. For the full Chinese set, see Chinese Ritual Relics.

Sources

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