The Tang writer Han Yu begins his short essay known as On Horses: “Only when there is a Bole are there thousand-li horses. Thousand-li horses are always there, but a Bole is not always there.” Bole was the legendary judge of horses. Without him, a fine horse is mistreated by grooms, dies in the stable “and is never called a thousand-li horse.”
The essay ends with a man holding a whip over the horse. “He says: ‘There are no horses under heaven!’ Alas, are there truly no horses? He truly does not know horses.”