11. VERY RARE GROUP OF FOUR PAINTED
POTTERY FEMALE POLO PLAYERS
Tang Dynasty (618-907)
15” (38 cm.) long, 8 5/8” (22 cm.) high approximately;
metal stands

The horses are painted in dark terracotta, paler reddish terracotta, cream, yellow and white pigments, mounted with tiger-striped pelts serving as saddle blankets. Four female players dressed in sporting apparel lean sharply over the sides of the horses, two with their torsos turned to the left, two to the right, caught animatedly as if striking balls. The horses are caught in “flying gallops” in fierce, forward momentum.

Another very rare, well known group of four equestrienne polo players in the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City is recorded in the Handbook of the Collections, vol. II, Art of the Orient, Kansas City, 1973, p. 81. A single female figure in the Rietberg Musuem, Zurich, is illustrated by Margaret Medley, T’ang Pottery and Porcelain, London, 1981, pl. 41; another more highly coloured female polo player was included in the exhibition, Chine: des Chevaux et des Hommes: Donation Jacques Polain, Musée Guimet, Paris, 1995-96, exhibition catalogue no. 54. A plainer, single figure in the Tenri Museum, Japan, is published in Sekai Toji Zenshu, Shogakukan Series, vol. 11, col. pl. 183. Two polo players, a female and a bearded foreigner wearing a hat from the Schloss Collection were included in the exhibition Power and Virtue: The Horse in Chinese Art, China Institute, New York, 1997, catalogue nos. 11 and 12. Both are made of the same material, constructed similarly, and points to the probable and unconventional acceptance of women competing in sport not just with men but foreigners as well.

The polo game is thought to have originated in Central Asia, in Iran or Tibet, where equestrian skills had an earlier historic tradition. In China, reliable evidence for polo dates from the 7th to 8th centuries. In one recorded instance, the Emperor Xuanzong (r. 712-756) led a team of four defeating a ten-man Tibetan team in 709. This event is described by Virginia L. Bower in a comprehensive history of the game, “Polo in Tang China: Sport and Art”, Asian Art 4, no. 1 (Winter 1991), p. 26. The most famous visual representation of the game is a painted mural in the tomb of Crown Prince Zhanghuai (654-684) recorded in Tang Li Xian mu Bihua, Shaanxi Provincial Museum, pls. 15-24 and again in Zhongguo Gudai Diyou Wenwu Duji (Sports in Ancient China), People’s Sports Publishing House, Beijing, pls. 85, 88-92.

Pottery figures of polo players have been excavated in Henan, Shaanxi and Xinjiang provinces, illustrating the popularity of the game along the far-flung regions of the Silk Road under the control of Tang China during the 8th century. Portrayals of female polo players were common, and more rarely, court ladies dressed in male attire (see catalogue no. 10). Equestrian sports and riding in general became part of a life of privilege in which women participated equally with men. In The Golden Peaches of Samarkand: A Study of T’ang Exotics, Edward H. Schafer gives a colourful account of the unconventional etiquette at this period of Chinese history:

“In T’ang times, men and women alike wore “barbarian” hats when they went abroad, especially when on horseback…... An edict of 671 attempted to outlaw these brazen-faced equestriennes, who should have traveled in decently covered carriages, but it was ignored, and by the early part of the eighth century women were riding about the city streets wearing Turkish caps, or even bare-headed, and dressed in men’s riding clothes and boots.”, pp. 28-29.

The open flouting of social conventions disappeared in the following Song Dynasty when women were once again segregated from male society with the return to Confucian values and the introduction of the cruel tradition of bound feet.