Ma Yuan

The old chronicles say

The book records: Yuan was fond of riding and skilled at judging fine horses; in Giao Chi he obtained the bronze drums of the Lac Viet, and cast them into a model horse, which he brought back and presented to the throne. It even records the dimensions of that horse: three thuoc five tac high, four thuoc five tac around the body, with an edict placing it below the Tuyen Duc hall as the model of a fine horse. The bronze drum — the most precious thing a community could cast, a thing only those with power owned — was melted down to make a model horse set below the steps of a palace hall in Luoyang, for officials to come and look at while learning how to judge a horse.¹

The words have to be read as they stand. The book does not say this was an act of destroying a symbol of local power. The reason it gives is Ma Yuan’s own taste: he loved horses, he was good at judging them, and he was following the precedent of a man in Emperor Wu of Han’s time who had cast a bronze horse and presented it to the throne. The reading that this was a blow of cultural suppression belongs to later generations — reasonable, since the bronze drum really was a symbol of power, but an inference rather than what the source says.¹

How later ages remembered

There is another story often mixed in here that needs separating out. Later Chinese writing carries a legend that Ma Yuan himself invented the bronze drum. It was first put forward by Fan Chengda, an official of the Song dynasty — that is, many centuries later than the Book of the Later Han; by the Ming dynasty someone had added that the large drums were made by Ma Yuan and the small ones by Zhuge Liang. The Book of the Later Han says nothing of the sort; it records only the taking of the drums and their casting into a horse.²