This talk by HU Suqing (Hunan University) will present an exploratory research initiative conducted under the framework of the Agreement on Cooperation between the AILC-ICLA and the UNESCO Memory of the World Programme (MoW), signed on 29 July 2025. In this talk, Dr. Hu will first introduce the project titled “The Ferghana Horse as Multimodal Cultural Memory: Two Millennia of Evolving Heritage Practices.” Since its introduction to China during the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE), the Ferghana Horse has occupied a vital position in the Chinese cultural imagination, inspiring a tradition that has continued for more than two millennia. Specifically, Dr. Hu will examine the cosmotechnical reconfiguration of the Ferghana horse as a key visual and conceptual mediator of trans-Eurasian exchange along the Silk Road, tracing its transformation from the Han through the Northern–Southern Dynasties. Grounded in Yuk Hui’s theory of cosmotechnics, this study argues that the horse functioned not merely as a technical or military object, but as a culturally embedded medium through which cosmological imagination, political authority, and religious thought were negotiated. Shaped by sustained interactions among Chinese, Central Asian, and steppe-linked traditions, the Ferghana horse became a site of synthesis rather than simple transmission.
Abstract
The introduction of the Ferghana Horse into early China represented far more than an eastward transfer of technical expertise or zoological knowledge. It set in motion a profound process of cosmotechnical reconfiguration, as understood through Yuk Hui’s conceptual framework of cosmotechnics. This talk will investigate the formative stages of this transformation from the Han dynasty (206 BCE–220 CE) through the Wei–Jin and Northern and Southern Dynasties (220–589 CE), situating it within the broader historical context of Silk Road exchanges and long-term cultural integration. Across this period, the horse was progressively reimagined from a biological and military instrument into a cosmologically charged medium. To substantiate this claim, the talk will adopt a multimodal analytical approach, drawing on a corpus of archaeological artifacts, pictorial representations, and textual sources, in order to examine how visual and textual evidence jointly register and negotiate the evolving semantics of the indigenization of the Ferghana Horse motif in China.
A comparative perspective is also introduced by situating this Chinese trajectory alongside contemporaneous Central Asian traditions and the Late Antique Mediterranean world, where equine motifs likewise retained cosmological resonance but tended to be articulated through more emblematic and ornamental systems of visual order.
Biography
Dr Hu Suqing is Associate Professor at the College of Foreign Language Studies, Hunan University, China.
She holds a PhD in Comparative Literature, and her research interests include human-animal studies, philosophy of technology, and science fiction studies.
Within the field of animal studies, she conducts research, in particular, on sympathetic human-animal relationships in nineteenth-century British literature and natural history, as well as human-nature and human-animal relations in ancient China, ancient technological thought and philosophy, and the modern transformation of these ideas. In addition, she is committed to animal-related volunteer work and has participated in various social initiatives promoting animal welfare.
Respondent
Professor Wen-Chin Ouyang (SOAS, University of London)
Wen-chin Ouyang is Professor of Arabic and Comparative Literature at SOAS, University of London. She is Fellow of the British Academy and Academician of Academia Sinica. Born in Taiwan and raised in Libya, she completed her BA in Arabic at Tripoli University and PhD in Middle Eastern Studies at Columbia University in New York City. A native speaker of Arabic and Chinese, she has been working towards Arabic-Chinese comparative literary and cultural studies, including Silk Road Studies and Multilingualism as Method.
She is the author of Literary Criticism in Medieval Arabic-Islamic Culture: The Making of a Tradition (1997), Poetics of Love in the Arabic Novel (2012) and Politics of Nostalgia in the Arabic Novel (2013), and Ethical Living Through Stories: Encounters with Adab (2025). She has also published widely on The Thousand and One Nights, often in comparison with classical and modern Arabic narrative traditions, European and Hollywood cinema, magic realism, and Chinese storytelling.
She has led projects on ideology and narration for the AHRB Centre for Asian and African Literatures (2000-2005), and on creative multilingualism and world literature for the OWRI Creative Multilingualism Programme (2016-2020).
At present, she is completing her project on multilingualism as method for comparative literature with focus on material culture, The Silk Roads of World Literature, for which she has received a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship (2026-2029).
She founded and co-edits Edinburgh Studies in Classical Arabic Literature. She has been the Editor-in-Chief of Middle Eastern Literatures since 2011. She also co-chairs the Editorial Committee of Legenda Studies in Comparative Literature. She was a member of the judging panel for Man Booker International Prize for Fiction 2013-15. She also judged the Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation in 2017.
See her article on The Silk Roads of Comparative Literature.
Professor Dame Jessica Rawson (Oxford University)
Dame Professor Jessica Rawson worked for over twenty years at the British Museum. She was responsible for the renovation of the Sir Joseph Hotung Gallery of Oriental Antiquities.
After moving to Oxford in 1994, where she was Warden of Merton College, 1994-2010, Professor Rawson organised further exhibitions in London at the British Museum and the Royal Academy: Chinese Jade from the Neolithic to the Qing and Mysteries of Ancient China; China: The Three Emperors 1662-1795; Treasures of Ancient Chinese, Bronze and Jades from Shanghai. She has published on Chinese jade, the archaeology of early China, the origins and development of the Silk Road. Her recent book on ancient Chinese tombs, Life and Afterlife in Ancient China was published in 2023 and is now available in a Chinese translation.
In 2017 she was awarded the Charles Lang Freer Medal, by the Freer Gallery Smithsonian Institution. She was made and Honorary Professor at Peking University in 2019 and at China Art Academy in Hangzhou in 2021. She was awarded the Tang Prize in Sinology in 2022.
Click here to register to attend the lecture
The lecture will be hosted by the Centre for Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London.
The ICLA/MoW Series is coordinated jointly by Professor Lucia Boldrini (Honorary President, AILC-ICLA; Honorary Director, Centre for Comparative Literature, Goldsmiths, University of London), Professor Ipshita Chanda (AILC-ICLA President, 2025-28) and Professor Lothar Jordan (Chair of the MoW Sub-Committee for Education and Research, SCEaR).
More information on the ICLA/ MoW collaboration