Grand Gallop: Art and Culture of the Horse is the exhibition catalogue of the Hong Kong Palace Museum. The bilingual catalogue is a paperback thread sewn volume with 75 color and 40 black and white illustrations. Beautifully designed but cumbersome to navigate. Traditional Chinese characters and English are printed vertically result in much head and book turning. The thread stitched binding is a nod to traditional Chinese books. With five essays and 45 item, the book discusses objects from the Han dynasty (206 B.C. – 220 C.E.) to the Qing (1644 – 1911) dynasties.
Horse domestication begin around 3500 BC, likely in the steppes of southern Russia and Kazakhstan. The use of horses enhanced commercial transport food agriculture and warfare and has fired imaginations from stone age times to the present.
Grand Gallop includes horse imagery from the great epochs of Chinese history, the Han, Tang, Yuan, and Qing periods. The Han rulers coveted the ‘heavenly horse’ of Central Asia far superior to the shorter local breed.
The Tang dynasty established the major genres of horse painting and sculpture as shown in artworks for the afterlife; tomb murals depict polo games and terracotta tomb sculptures of horseback riders. Like the Great Wall horses were the armored divisions of the time and were the first line of national defense.
The Yuan dynasty’s Mongol rulers established their empire on horseback and terrorized the known world from Asia to Europe. The great artist Zhao Mengfu (1254 – 1323) embraced the archaic styles of previous times, depicting horses in a refined style of draftsmanship harkening back to Tang styles of the 7th century.
The Qing dynasty (1644 – 1911) were the last dynastic rulers of Imperial China and were greatly indebted to horse culture. The Qing Imperial Household Department had a division for the ‘Ministry of Imperial Stables.’
The most favored painter of the Qing court in the 18th century was the Italian Jesuit Giuseppe Castiglione also known as Lang Shining (1688 – 1766), who painted many portraits of the emperors and high court officials in a style that blended Western realism with Chinese aesthetics. His work is represented with a stunning portrait of Qianlong in full armour mounted on his favorite white steed.
So important was the horse to the Qing, Manchu court dress utilized horse hoof sleeves and were incorporated in official court dress. Court ladies of the Qing court accompanied and joined in royal hunts as shown in the exhibition a court lady riding at full gallop hands an arrow to the emperor Qianlong shooting a bow.
Even the mid-19th century ladies of the harem Imperial Concubine Ying and Noble Lady Shun are depicted horseback riding in men’s attire wear imperial yellow riding jackets, boots and swords. Their powdered white makeup and red lips and triple earrings reveal they are high ranking ladies of the palace.
Grand Gallop includes is a first time collaboration with the Palace Museum, with several loans from France’s Louvre Museum that augment and expand the purview of the exhibition/catalogue. Construction on the Hong Kong Palace Museum began in 2019 and completed in July 2022. It is a satellite of the Palace Museum Beijing located in West Kowloon Cultural District.
