A Cosmotechnical Perspective on the Ferghana Horse

An exploration of the Ferghana Horse in ancient China and as key visual and conceptual mediator of trans-Eurasian exchange on the Silk Road.

A lecture by HU Suqing (Hunan University), and the first event in the ICLA/Memory of the World Series, part of a collaboration between the International Comparative Literature Association and the UNESCO "Memory of the World" Programme, hosted by the Centre for Comparative Literature.

Since its introduction to China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the Ferghana Horse has occupied a vital position in the Chinese cultural imagination, inspiring a tradition that has continued for more than two millennia. Across this period, the horse was progressively reimagined from a biological and military instrument into a cosmologically charged medium.

The introduction of the Ferghana Horse into early China represented far more than an eastward transfer of technical expertise or zoological knowledge. It set in motion a profound process of cosmotechnical reconfiguration as a key visual and conceptual mediator of trans-Eurasian exchange along the Silk Road. Dr Hu will trace its transformation from the Han through the Northern–Southern Dynasties.

Relying on Yuk Hui’s conceptual framework of cosmotechnics, Dr. Hu argues that the horse functioned not merely as a technical or military object, but as a culturally embedded medium through which cosmological imagination, political authority, and religious thought were negotiated. Shaped by sustained interactions among Chinese, Central Asian, and steppe-linked traditions, the Ferghana horse became a site of synthesis rather than simple transmission.

To substantiate this claim, the talk will adopt a multimodal analytical approach, drawing on a corpus of archaeological artifacts, pictorial representations, and textual sources, in order to examine how visual and textual evidence jointly register and negotiate the evolving semantics of the indigenization of the Ferghana Horse motif in China.

A comparative perspective is also introduced by situating this Chinese trajectory alongside contemporaneous Central Asian traditions and the Late Antique Mediterranean world, where equine motifs likewise retained cosmological resonance but tended to be articulated through more emblematic and ornamental systems of visual order.

Respondents:

Professor Wen-chin Ouyang (SOAS, University of London)
Professor Dame Jessica Rawson (Oxford University)

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