Rubbing

Rubbing of one of the six relief-sculptures of horses from Tang Taizong’s mausoleum, Zhaoling, in Shaanxi Province, China. It is done using black ink on paper so as to resemble a traditional ink-squeeze rubbing, though it is clearly not a rubbing from the original sculpture. It is much smaller, and the depth of relief on the original sculptures does not lend itself to the ink-squeeze technique. Sets of “rubbings” of this kind were made and sold by shops in Xi’an in the first half of the 20th century after the six horse reliefs were moved from their original location at the mausoleum and became a topic of widespread interest. The text above the image identifies the horse as Bai-ti-wu, whose stone relief is in the Beilin Museum in Xi’an, and includes the rhymed metrical verse composed for the horse by the Taizong Emperor.