58
HERBERT FRANKE
as if the court historiographers and recorders recognized the importance of the mission. The Western horse, at least, impressed Mongols and Chinese alike. It was, if not one of the Flemish battle horses, certainly much bigger and stronger than the native breed of horses familiar to the Mongols. The court painter Chou Lang was commissioned to paint a portrait of the horse. This painting was still extant in the eighteenth century when the Jesuit Father Gaubil saw it; the Catalog of the Imperial Collections compiled in 1815 lists it. There is no trace of that painting left, but in a time when so many and sometimes stunning discoveries are made in China and Chinese archives we should not give up all hope of tracing this pictorial evidence of Giovanni da Marignolli's embassy. Apart from painting, there are many passages in fourteenth-century Chinese literature where allusion is made to the gift of Western horses to the emperor. Many poets of that time wrote poems praising this kingly gift and extolling the horse which, as one poet says, stood out like a camel among the other horses in the Imperial stables. At least a full dozen writers can be found who considered this horse important enough to be the subject of a poem. Almost invariably, allusion is made to the famous "Heavenly Horses" brought to China under the Han Dynasty from the Western Regions by Chang Ch'ien. Then, as under Shun-ti, the gift of a Heavenly Horse was regarded as an auspicious omen for the Imperial house and the emperor in particular. All this is completely in accordance with Chinese tradition. If far-distant countries send tribute, this shows that the Mandate of Heaven truly extends to the end of the inhabited world. One wonders what Giovanni da Marignolli would have thought, being the representative of the Vicar of Christ on earth, if he had known that his embassy served as the subject for a display of Sinocentric sentiment and an exhibition of pro-dynastic loyalty. The lucky omen of the Heavenly Horses turned out to be of not much avail, however. A few decades later, the emperor had to flee to the Mongolian steppes when the Ming troops took Peking. It remains, nevertheless, quite surprising that so many Chinese poets (there is hardly a non-Chinese among them) went to the length of writing hymns of praise of the dynasty when nobody forced them to, and it seems that at least among the literati, there was not yet much anti-dynastic and anti-Mongol feeling. In any case, it is striking how much this incident is treated in literature in a traditional Chinese way.