Thriving Circus Acts and Animal Plays
4 min readThe circus acts and animal plays thrived in the Tang dynasty. There were various performances of horsemanship, circus acts and polo plays and the list went on. The horsemanship was popular at the imperial court as well as among the commoners. The horse raising and horse breaking were prevalent at that time and Emperor Tangxuanzong kept five hundred horses for variety shows.
Riding and shooting were musts for the emperors to command. Some emperors were very fond of these activities and Emperor Tangtaizong and Emperor Tangxuanzong were no exception. In the Tang dynasty the polo play was popular throughout the empire.
Beside the polo there were other categories of acrobatic shows on the horse in the imperial court which were performed by the female artists from the Yichun court of the Jiao Fang. In ornate dressing and various ornaments the female artist on thegalloping horse performed highly sophisticated acts such as sticking up the leg or bending down and keeping herself out of spectators’ sight.
As a saying goes,”The upper class’s favorites will come to prevail among the commoners as wel1″. The popularity of the circus acts in the imperial court stimulated the development of the folk circus acts which modeled on those at the imperial court. In the reign of Emperor Tangdezong a man surnamed Xia in the Hebei troops put a stack of more than a dozen copper coins in the court before he rode a horse towards the stack of coins. When the horse passed by the stack of coins the performer hit one coin off the stack and sent it flying seven zhang or 23.3 meters away. Hitting off the coins one by one on a galloping horse is extremely hard to execute since one and only one coin must be hit off with no allowance of the least carelessness. The modern circus act of “picking up money on the galloping horse” must have developed from these techniques.
The horse dance which appeared in the Southern and Northern dynasties and thrived in the Tang dynasty was most representative of the circus acts. The scenes of horse dancing on a grand scale, the graceful dancing to music and stunning variety shows were unparalleled. What was even more amusing was that the horse coul hold the wine cup and pass it to the guest, which really defies imagination!
In the Tang dynasty the horse dancing involving as many as a hundred horses was a magnificent scene. Poet Lu Guimeng depicts a hundred horses trotting to the drum beats. What was even more amazing was that one hundred horses were trained to gyrate in union while the acrobats performed sophisticated acts on the horse back. It is obvious that the acrobats in the horse dancing were well-trained. That the skills of horse dancing reached the apogee was reflected in the dancing horse ascending the hathpace. Such a show was performed in two ways: one was that the horse carrying a performer mounted the hathpace and put up various acts on the narrow hathpace; the other was that after the horse carrying a performer mounted the hathpace, another man of extraordinary strength lifted up the whole of the hathpace, the horse and the performer while the performer and the horse displayed the horsemanship.”Threading through the narrow space between and among the swords”as mentioned above was also a display of horsemanship in the Tang dynasty.
In the Tang dynasty the animal plays, especially the plays involving small animals enjoyed great popularity in the imperial court as well as among the common people. In the Pictures of Xin Xi Gu Yue one piece portrays a money going through the loop and similar scenes of monkey plays can be found in other paintings. In one painting there are about a dozen spectators and one performer holds one end of aleash and on the other end of the leash is tied a monkey; the monkey comes to the front of the crowd and holds up its upper limbs; on the right of the monkey two men are carrying a golden loop; it seems a marvelous show is to be unfolded. Among all the acrobatic shows made debut in the Tang dynasty, what deserves special mention ithe cock-fighting which enjoyed unprecedented popularity as it was a favorite game for those at the imperial court and the commoners as well.
An important indicator of animal plays’ popularity in the Tang dynasty was the training of insects. Starting from the Tianbao reign of the Tang dynasty, the cricket fighting enjoyed growing popularity. The affluent had the ivory carved into cricket coops and wagered a big sum of money in the cricket fighting, which presented clues that the cricket fighting game flourished. Besides, the flycatchers, a subspecies of the spiders, were also trained. In the reign of Emperor Tangmuzong,a man named Han Zhihe stood in front of the emperor and took out a cypress box in which there were at least 200 flycatchers in five lines. The flycatchers wriggled at Han’s directions. The emperor had the musicians play tunes to which the flycatchersdanced and when the tune died down they left the performing spot in an orderly way as if they were arranged in a hierarchy. It is evident that insect raising was fairly advanced at that time since as many as a hundred insects had been trained to dance to the music.
