Zhao Mausoleum

This guide to Zhao Mausoleum in Xi'an opens with an arrow lodged in the war horse Saluzi's chest during a seventh-century battle near Luoyang, and the officer Qiu Xinggong who knelt to pull it free by hand. It traces how Emperor Taizong of Tang later ordered that moment carved in stone, one relief among six horses designed by the painter Yan Liben for his tomb on Jiuzong Mountain, their foreign names revealing they were gifts from the steppe. Stand on this mountainside where a wounded horse once held still for a man with a knife.