140 THE HORSES OF PREHISTORIC [CH. 



Great Wall, is held the market. " Hither flock horse-dealers 

 from as far south as Hunan, and ponies from Urga and the 

 Kerulon. In June and July the horse trade is in full swing." 

 The average price of a pony is twenty taels^ 



As at the present day the Mongolian pony is the chief 

 horse in China, so too was it in medieval, and we may there- 

 fore presume in still earlier, days. Marco Polo, speaking of 

 the province of Carajan (the modern Yunnan), which then 

 formed part of the dominions of the Great Khan, says that 

 the country is one in which excellent horses are bred, and 

 the people live by cattle and agriculture''. In another part 

 of Carajan were " bred large and excellent horses, which are 

 taken to India for sale, and you must know that the people 

 dock two or three joints of the tail from their horses to prevent 

 them flipping their riders, a thing which they consider very 

 unseemly. They ride long like Frenchmen, and wear armour 

 of boiled leather, and carry spears and shields and arblasts, and 

 all their quarls are poisoned^" To this day the tribes of Honhi, 

 in the extreme south of Yunnan, have plenty of horses, 

 buffaloes, oxen, and sheep ^. 



At what exact period the Chinese began to employ the 

 horse is not certain. Horses are only twice mentioned in the 

 Book of History {Shu Ching), but frequently in the Odes {Shih 

 Clang). King Mu', who visited the West about B.C. 975, 

 travelled in a chariot drawn by eight horses. It would thus 

 appear that in China, as elsewhere, the horse was first driven •*. 

 It is now clear that the thoroughbred horse has not come 

 from any of the stocks which have ranged through Upper Asia 

 and Upper Europe in historical times, and it will be just as 

 easy to prove that it is not derived from any of the horses of 

 Southern China, Further India, or the Malay Archipelago. 



1 C. W. Campbell, op. cit., p. 8. - Vol. ii. p. 52. 



3 Vol. II. p. 63. " Vol. II. p. 101, Yule's note. 



^ For this information I am indebted to the kindness of my friend Prof. H. A. 

 Giles. The Chinese profess to tell a horse's age by the teeth up to thirty-two years. 



•5 At the funeral of Li Hung Chang a chariot and horses made of paper were 

 burned. This probably is a survival from a time when a great man's chariot 

 and horses would have been buried with him, just as his horses were buried 

 with a Tartar khan and a Scythian king. 



