emperor went out to the archery hall and ordered his court officials to
shoot.^5 A similar incident occurred in the early Tang, which included an
explicit admonition regarding the need for constant training and the
place of the trained warrior in society. Li Shimin addressed a gathering
of generals after summoning them to practice archery in the courtyard of
the Manifesting Virtue Hall on 17 October 626 :
From ancient times there wasflourishing and decline between the Türks and China.
As the Yellow Emperor was skilled with thefive weapons, he was able to north-
wardly pursue the Xiongnu [Xunyu, Scythians according to Matthews, later called
Xiongnu during the Qin and Han]...
Coming to the rulers of the Han and Jin, up to the Sui, they did not make the
soldiers and officers train regularly with the weapons of war (lit. shields and
halberds). When the Türks invaded none were able to oppose them. Bringing
about the sending away of Chinese people to great distress from invaders. I now
do not let you dig ponds and construct parks, building these dissolute and wasteful
things, the farmers will throw off restraint and give in to indolence and pleasure, the
soldiers and officers only practice archery and riding, so that when you are sent to
fight, then seeing you at the front there will not be unexpected enemies.^6
Li was laying out a clear pact with his generals: if they and their troops
worked hard at their skills, then the farmers would work hard and support
them. After this, several hundred men were brought before the hall every
day for instruction in archery. The emperor personally observed this train-
ing, awarding bows and swords to the men who hit the target. Direct
imperial supervision drove home the critical importance of archery and
maintained a high level of training in general. The emperor made martial
arts a matter of imperial interest and provided an opportunity for a skilled
soldier to stand out in front of his ruler.
Soldiers were usually armed with one bow and thirty arrows. There were
four kinds of bows, with the two main ones being long bows for the infantry
and“horn”bows for the cavalry. Assignment to infantry or cavalry was
straightforward:“Generally the people become soldiers at 20 and retire at
sixty. Those able to ride and shoot become cavalry, the remainder become
infantry.”^7 This separation at recruitment would have biased the cavalry
toward upper-class and non-Chinese men; ordinary Chinese farmers would
have been unlikely to have learned to ride, let alone ride and shoot. While it
was policy and practice to train the men in archery and to maintain that
skill through repetition, it does not seem that men unfamiliar with horses
were recruited into the army and then trained to ride. In both the Sui and
the Tang, many men were noted for their skill with archery, or archery and
riding. Skill at archery was an important marker of martial prowess.
100 The Sui and Tang Dynasties