I saw a Tang heavy cavalry from this thread, he is wearing a greenish armour:
http://www.chinahistoryforum.com/index.php...=12786&st=0

If I am not wrong, than this is quite a wrongful depiction of Tang heavy cavalry (?), since the belly part looked more like European and the horse armour is just weird for East Asian.

Could anyone explains more?

Who knows? I saw in a Chinese message board discussing wether Tang was a dynasty belonging to authentic Han people. I don’t know though.

However, take this in mind, Tang, beside Yuan, was really a dynasty in China most western-like. In Tang dynasty, we had famous poet Lee Bai, who was white skin with blue eyes. Tang blatantly attacked East Turk or West Turk(東西突厥)? Tang had a war with Arab Alliance for westward expansion. Tang dynasty was really open for sex. A Tang emperor was the first “Chinese” emperor, who took in action to try to annihilate Buddhism in China. Tang people invented the first original Samurai sword (Tankata, Tang Big Dao), that considered exotic to Chinese now; because Chinese did not use them after Tang dynasty for unknown reason………….. Many more Tang facts displayed too much “Western Soul” for Chinese.

So why not on Tang used European armors?

And if you were familiar in Chinese books dealing with Tang history, they would all state a proverb for a Tang dressing code “Hu liked to dress like Han, Han dressed like Hu,”. So there you are – Tang European-like armory.

That's not quite the point though. I'm not sure that a cosmopolitan Tang dynasty means they would necessarily possess European armor, and the Tang style Dao, while similar in looks to the Katana, were merely an ancestor, and not quite a "Samurai sword". The Turks were in shifting alliances with the Tang (not sure how this is western like...), and the "War" with the Arabs was in reality merely a small battle. That said, contact and trade with the west was very high in the Tang.

Boleslaw, I don't really think the Barding looks all too non Chinese, though the quilted armor does look strange...

No, no, not totally the barding. It is to me that the role of light cavalry has become increasingly important, rather than heavy armed troops during the Sui dynasty. So this is quite weird.

Actually, that's very easily explained. If you look further down the page, it mentions that those are actually Sui, and not Tang troops.

Tang troops, for the most part, preferred to be without the barding.

Yang Zongbao is right. The horse armour/barding looks essentially like Northern Dynasties styles, while the quilted armour is clearly out of place on a suit of mingguang kai.



I would challenge anyone on that board to define what an "authentic Han person" might be.



This paragraph is just riddled with inaccuracies. No one knows what Li Bai looked like - the theory that he was of Turkish ancestry is based on some clues that he might have been born in Suyab in Central Asia, but it's not conclusive either. I don't see how Tang conflict with the Turks has anything to do with the ethnic or cultural identity of the Tang emperors. Tang expansion into Central Asia was about control of the Silk Road, not about being culturally "western" - otherwise the eastward expansion of the Arabs could just as well be taken as a sign that they liked Chinese culture! Tang emperors' openness in sexual matters was no greater than that for the Han period, or the Northern and Southern Dynasties, or the Sui. It was only from the Song onwards that most emperors became really prudish because of tighter Confucian indoctrination among the political elite. The single Tang emperor who tried to ban Buddhism also banned all other foreign religions, so I don't see how that makes him more 'western'; nor was he the first to ban Buddhism - the first was a Northern Wei emperor in the 450s. Tang single-edged swords (dao) were exactly the same form as those used ever since the Han period, and were not curved like the katana - in fact, Japanese swords were straight just like Tang swords until a few centuries after the end of Tang.

armour, please be careful when choosing what books to read. I don't think the ones you've been using are very credible at all.

Not really light cavalry, which means horse-archers with little or no armour. I'd call the main type of Tang cavalry "heavy cavalry without horse armour". The riders were still heavily armed and armoured, but the horses had no protection.