I suppose whenever we think about great warriors/generals of the past like Yue Fei, Guan Yu etc our 1st impression will be that they are big sized and muscular.

Recently I got some facts about modern day Jockeys which made me change my impression of these warriors.

To qualify to be a jockey in order to ride a horse to enter into those horse riding competitions, one must be below a certain weight and if I remember correctly it is 55kg. Anyone above 55kg will automatically be disqualified from being a jockey irregardles of how skillful the rider is.

The reason for that is the horse cannot carry a too heavy weight on him or it will have difficulty running.

So for this reason, I think that generals in the past were only average size and not as musclar and big size as we will have imagined. Take note that a jockey wears nothing except for a helmet when he goes into a competition and yet he must be below a certain weight in order for the horse to be able to run fast and carry him.

A general will be wearing a heavy helmet, heavy armour and carrying heavy weapons with him too. He will probably also carry some food and water supplies with him too like how our modern day soliders will carry a haversack with some food and water supplies which could last them a few days. So I think that generals were just average size as they have to carry so many equipments with them when riding the horse. If they were really so big sized and musclar, common sense tell us that the horse will not be able to carry such a heavy weightload on his back. Even if he can do it, he will be running at a very slow speed which could critcally endanger the general's life in a battlefield.

One may say that generals are given superior horses to ride on during wars. But even with a superior horse, I doubt that he will be able to run fast with such a heavy weightload on his back if the general riding it was really so big sized. Moreover, I am sure jockeys are given superior horses to enter into competitions too and not use a lousy horse to enter into competitions

Dear fireice,

You have a good point there.

This is my opinion...I think historians of the past tend to exaggerate a bit regarding the size of generals. Since Guan Yu was a hero, they probably described him as very strong and muscular. After all, some parts of history that is recorded now might not be true.

However, I am not so sure. Shows and books describe Guan Yu as a strong and fit general. But yet, you are right, the horses that they are riding on will not run fast.

Hmm......we also can assume that the horses during ancient times were much stronger and fitter, and they are able to carry heavy-weighed generals who have lots of muscles and their heavy weapons. After all, I heard that last time, Mongolian horses were actually quite huge and strong, thus being able to bear heavy weights on their backs. However, in modern times (don't know why), the horses in Mongolia are small-sized.

Of course, there are also many possibilities.

Please pardon me for my ignorance (if there are errors).

Liu Bang

I know that exaggeration is quite common specially when it involves person who is very popular.
However, I do believe that those generals were not small.
Of course we can not compare it with the modern day jockeys, who has to compete based on speed.
Unless I am mistaken, I believed somebody like Taishi-chi was said to be 180 cms and Guan Yu, Zhang Fei were said to be 6 feet.
Now, you can not be 6 feet tall and skinny, specially if you are trainned to fight in a war. I think the exaggeration part could be in the armour and the heavy war equipment that they were carrying.
Guan Yu as I understand was riding a rather special big horse, which should explain the extra power that it had to carry him.
Also, I do not believe that you need to ride very fast. The general and the officers will be the persons in the army with the horses. So any horse even with the heavy should be able to outrun any foot-soldier. Having a fast horse will not serve anything, infact it could be dangerous if the generals are running way to far ahead of their foot-soldiers.
Sun Ce paid the price of running ahead of army with his life.

I don't subscribe to the idea that warriors in the past were small, and built like jockeys.

Let's get one thing in mind to start off with. Jockeys are trying to ride a horse as fast as possible. Cavalry are not seeking speed, but mobility and shock value. The lack of speed was particularly so before the advent of the stirrup, which meant that even shock value was limited, but there was a still a great height advantage for the mounted man versus the foot soldier, as well as an advantage in mobility around and on the battlefield.

Even at the height of the cavalryman's mastery of the battlefield, he didn't move that fast. Most nineteenth century cavalry walked, trotted, and cantered before galloping only at the very end of a charge. This was for two reasons. One was a horse could very easily be blown if made to charge too far at the gallop. The other was that to maintain order, they had to manouvre at something less even than the canter most of the time.

Now, in reality, most warhorses used by heavy cavalry were built more like draft horse than race horses. Western knights used a special horse called a destrier, which was large enough to bear the weight of an armoured man about the battlefield. The same would have been true in the East if the rider was armoured.

Finally, a soldier has to have the strength to move about on the battlefield, and actually fight his opponent. Most foot soldiers would have been peasant, used to working hard in the fields. To overcome them the professional soldier had to be stronger as well as more skillful, and that means he had to be larger, whether he was mounted or otherwise.

As for generals, they are no different from any other soldier on the battlefield, except perhaps if one expects an even greater degree of martial prowess.

I hope this helps.

About the sizes of Generals/warriors, I read somewhere that Genghis Khan might not be very muscular or strong like his brothers. In the Mongolian's Secret History, Genghis Khan's mother talked about how Genghis Khan and another of his siblings (I forgot which one) both shared her breast milk and couldn't finish it, but his brother Khasar could drink up the milk and made her feel better physically. In addition, when Genghis Khan's father left him with his new father-in-law, Genghis Khan's father mentioned to the in-laws that Genghis Khan was afraid of the dogs and requested the in-laws to keep the dogs away from Genghis Khan during his stay. It looked like Genghis Khan was not a warrior who had great physical strengths or size that could scare away the dogs. However, all his friends and enemies agreed that Genghis Khan was a commander and a leader with a lot of cunnings, and he led his armies with brain and not with muscles.

It is not always the muscle bound warrior that gains the leadership , but the quick and shrewd thinker who is charismatic and a natural manipulator that becomes the leader.

I agree that a successful general must be many things, and that the ability to make shrewd decisions on and off the battlefield are part of it, but nobody would select a man to be a general on the basis that he was built like a jockey. Moreover, generalship is not a profession like being a barrister. A general must first and foremost be a soldier, and a basic level of physical prowess is expected, even these days, of military officers. In ancient times this was even more so.

Of course I am sure you would agree that a person is no more likely to be wise because they are slightly built, than if they were solidly built. Thus, even if wisdom alone was enough, it does not follow that generals would have looked like jockeys.

Not necessarily in ancient China. I have read a few cases where the famous general was actually someone who was a scholar and had no martial skills at all. There was supposed to be a general who sat in a cart on the battle field. I think he was either old or a bit of handicapped in some ways. He was mentioned by one of my most respected Japanese fiction writer, Yoshiki Tanaka, when the author wrote his non-fiction of the list of the famous Chinese generals 《中国名将列傳》. This general in the cart was also a good general. The Ming dynasty general and philosopher, Wang Shouren (Wang Yangming of the Yangming school of thoughts), was a great general who stopped a prince's rebellion. Wang was supposed to be a scholar first and a general second. Although there were talks about his practicing of internal Kungfu and he might know how to use a sword, but he was not known as a swordsman or had true martial skills (at least, I have not heard of any, but I could be wrong about him). Many of the top Chinese generals in the later imperial era were scholars and not warriors. The Chinese government officials, like mayors or provincial governors were expected to organize fights against invaders and rebels when needed. Most of them were just regular scholars and not warriors at all. However, many of them would pick up swords and command battles like any other generals. Wen Tianxiang of Song and Shi Kefa of Ming were both such persons. Whether or not they were effective generals were not really that important (except for the consequences of their defeats), the importance was that they were willing to uphold their martial responsibilities as regional officials whether or not they actually had any martial or military skills. Their actions inspired many others who did have those skills to volunteer to fight.