The domestication of the horse changed history forever, for no people more so than the ancient residents of Kazakhstan both human and equine
In an inspiring return 200 years in the making, the last truly wild horse species has been reintroduced onto the open steppes of Kazakhstan.
The Guardian reports that four mares from a breeding program in Berlin and a stallion and two other mares from Prague, were flown to the Central Asian country to mark the second successful reintroduction of Przewalski’s horse to the lands that above all others are associated with this beloved animal.
At an unspecified place on the Eurasian Steppe around 6,000 years ago, of which Kazakhstan is a major component, human beings domesticated the horse. It changed history forever...
In 2011, Prague Zoo was also involved in a reintroduction of Przewalski’s horses to Mongolia which continued for 8 years until the population stabilized. There are now 1,500 such horses in the country.
The Kazakhstan reintroduction comes on the back of several environmental success stories driven by a passionate environmental movement in the country. This has included the reintroduction of Bukhara deer around the shores of Lake Balkhash, and the continued legislative and conservation efforts to restore the majestic saiga antelope, which have resulted in a growth of the population to 1.9 million.
Technically this was released like three weeks ago, but I wanted to make a post introducing Cloud9 Hanfu's new collection for the 2026 Year of the Horse. I've been working on these since literally the last lunar new year because I wanted to get the designs up and running by mid-autumn, so that people who wanted to wear the designs on lunar new year had time to buy them and receive them before February, rather than the designs being released on new year's.
Onto the lore: the 2026 Year of the Horse collection is split into three themed subcategories, each having something to do with horses:
1. 唐三彩 - Tang Tricolor Glaze (3 sets)
2. 胡服騎射 - Styles from the Steppes (3 sets)
3. 馬面演變 - Evolution of the Mamianqun (1 set with 6 versions)
+ and then a bonus tote bag, which makes eight total designs!
I spent a lot of time figuring out the designs this year; I've reached a stage of design at which I do really want to put some of my own voice into the art that I make. I will probably very very slowly make a post about each of the eight designs. For this post, though, I wanted to introduce each of the categories and write down some of my thoughts regarding the goal of this collection and the cultural elements I was trying to explore.
This can also serve as a compass/navigator for when I get all the individual posts for the designs out; I'll link them here!
三彩打馬球俑, #000133N000000000, Taipei National Palace Museum Opendata Digital Archive (https://digitalarchive.npm.gov.tw/opendata/)
Tang Sancai is a ceramic glaze style that was most prevalent during the Tang Dynasty (though it appeared in adjacent time periods as well). It's a very distinctive style, primarily using the three colors green, yellow, and white (technically a colorless glaze over white clay), though other colors like blue, red, and black can also appear—the 'three' is more of an allusion to 'many,' rather than a strict number of colors.
三彩立馬, #000441N000000000, Taipei National Palace Museum Opendata Digital Archive (https://digitalarchive.npm.gov.tw/opendata/)
One of the most common subjects of Tang Sancai art was the horse; specifically, the elegant and slender Ferghana horse, a species of horse that once lit up the Silk Road. In the later dynasties, the Ferghana horse fell out of popularity, replaced by stouter and sturdier local breeds like the Mongolian horse, and later went extinct. Sancai horse figurines are some of the best depictions we have of them.
Conceptual Discussion
I wanted to use Tang Sancai to explore a specific concept: how art and culture can create bridges across time and space.
The Chinese character for 'diaspora' (the closest one-character concept, at least) is 僑 qiao2, which is a homonym for the character for 'bridge,' which is 橋 qiao2. My interest and engagement in hanfu has always been intimately intertwined with and purposefully aimed towards exploring diaspora identities.
Even as a pretty hardcore stem nerd, it's utterly clear to me that one of art's greatest powers is its ability to make connections between our individual lived human experiences. None of us can see directly into each other's minds—it's up to us to make an attempt to communicate our thoughts accurately, many of which are complex and hard to describe. Art is one of the ways we try to do that.
And especially for the kinds of art we tend to research in the hanfu community, art creates bridges across vast oceans and across thousands of years. English-speaking people with Chinese cultural origins like myself are everywhere now—people move towards the light, whether they're chasing opportunity or escaping a vicious cycle.
A sancai-glazed jar Tang dynasty, Lot 218, Sotheby's
As one of the most iconic art styles of its time, Sancai wares can be found everywhere now—in China, sure, but also in museums on completely different continents, at antique auctions, and behind the glass doors of curio cabinets. You recognize it as soon as you see it, even if you're not all that familiar with ceramics or history or culture. There’s even a super cute mini Tang Sancai horse on a shelf next to our breakfast nook in my family home.
唐三彩印花枕 / Pillow with impressed floral decoration in sancai glaze，#000101N000000000, Taipei National Palace Museum Opendata Digital Archive (https://digitalarchive.npm.gov.tw/opendata/)
Additionally, and this is something that would apply to most ceramic arts, there's an element of chance that goes into glazing pottery that I find very beautiful: you don't know what the final result is going to look like until after you've finished firing it. Many of the beautiful dripping and melting patterns created in Sancai glaze are especially vulnerable to this: you can try to guide the glass to melt in a certain way, but it's up to chemistry and gravity to finish the job. These ceramic horses were given shape hundreds of years ago by the exact same thermodynamic principles and natural phenomena that we continue to observe and study today.
Design Notes
Tie-dyed silk crepe for the Amie design's skirt, hand-dyed to order in Hubei (to be clear, I paid a traditional dye lady in Hubei to do this, I dunno how to do this myself)
To emphasize the idea of crossing bridges, I went into these three designs with the idea of crossing the boundaries between different forms of media. There are a lot of different forms of art out there, many of which I don't have the time to really engage with in my 24 hours a day, but I wanted to at least touch on other media, so all three of the designs employ at least one other medium or craft that I can write about later.
The character 胡 hu2 refers to non-Han ethnic and cultural groups living in or near ancient China. This is a word that has been used both positively and negatively throughout history. I use it because it's the most well-recognized and concise way to refer to this specific group of people during this specific time period.
胡服 hu2 fu2 refers to the non-Han clothing worn by 胡 people, which mooooostly followed its own branch of evolution. While this is an umbrella term that covered a lot of different people, a good majority of them—the Xianbei, Khitan, Mongolians, to name a few—were nomadic people hailing from the Eurasian steppes, and as a result had clothing particularly suited to a nomadic lifestyle on horseback.
Kublai Khan Hunting, Yuan Dynasty 1280, Painting and Calligraphy in the Mongol Yuan Dynasty, National Palace Museum in Taipei
I think my sister Yulan (Cloud9 cofounder) wrote a good introduction to the subject in the instagram post we made announcing the category, so I'll just quote her here:
Over numerous dynasties and thousands of years of cultural remixing, Hanfu as a broad clothing category has assimilated elements from a wealth of different peoples and cultures outside of the Han. The Silk Road brought inspirations from the far West lands, and frequent invasions, integrations, and sometimes even rule by the various Northern peoples from the steppes beyond the Central Plains instilled strong influences in many clothing styles.
The Han did not always view these “foreigners” favorably—in fact, their word for the non-Han, usually horse-riding nomadic peoples hailing from northern and western grasslands was Hu 胡, roughly (and perhaps unsatisfactorily) translated in English as “barbarian.” Typically, the Hu peoples included Mongolic, Turkic, and Tibetan groups* such as the Xianbei and Xiongnu peoples, as well as the Jie, Di, and Qiang peoples and later on even Western and Central Asian immigrants such as Iranians (Sogdians).
While hanfu 漢服 literally means “clothing of the Han people,” the Hu peoples’ impacts on hanfu clothing—or rather, what eventually came to be accepted as hanfu—cannot be denied.
*note from me: Some linguistically inclined people might be more familiar with the term Tungusic, so for the record that's included too (Jurchens/Manchurians, Khitans etc, southern Tungusic languages are more relevant bc yknow. physically closer)
胡服騎射 hu2 fu2 qi2 she4 refers specifically to a policy enacted during the Warring States by King Wuling of the Zhao state (if you're not familiar with dynastic time periods, this is very very early on).
The first two characters are hufu, we went over that already. 騎射 qi2 she4 means horseback archery, or more specifically 騎 means riding a horse, and 射 means to shoot (an arrow). Together, you could translate the whole thing as "wearing hufu during archery on horseback."
Northern Wei Pottery Figures (9833213205), National Museum, Wikimedia Commons, 2011
Technically, this was mostly aimed at the military: the edict was that the state's cavalry should wear hufu as standard uniform, instead of the longer traditional robes they had worn before. But socially, this was a very intentional cultural-political move.
In establishing such a reform, Zhao Wuling tipped the scales of political power in his favor, especially in the process of "winning over" dissenters. The PR effect also made the frequent conquering/invading of said hu people smoother, optics-wise. But looking at the butterfly effect, by presenting hu people favorably to Han people, he managed to establish a cultural relationship in the larger population that would continue to cycle for centuries.
Conceptual Discussion
So clearly, Han fashion has a very complicated relationship with hufu—sharing, stealing, exterminating alike—that reflects the turbulence between cultures in what we call China today. This is by no means a nice topic to look at; it's rife with cycles of xenophobia and appropriation, but it is something that happened. At the end of the day, surrounding cultures had an enormous and continuous influence on the evolution of hanfu, and so I feel obligated to acknowledge it.
If you personally don't want to consider my creative work here as 'hanfu,' or if this topic is personally triggering, that's totally okay—just don't be mean to anyone about it.
There’s a lot of contention within the Hanfu community about what counts or doesn’t count as Hanfu. This isn’t new—ancient China went through the exact same thing many times over, scholars arguing back and forth what was allowed to count as Han and what wasn’t. They flipped back and forth between considering hufu the hottest new trend and pushing for Han tradition.
It’s something that’s bound to happen when it comes to any subject revolving around identity, and it extends intimately into the lives of Chinese diaspora, especially kids who grew up with it. Whether we notice it or not, we spend a lot of time wondering what it means to be Chinese enough, what we have to change about ourselves to find a name that sounds like home.
It's not always pretty to look at, but I find it comforting to know that people have always struggled to define the edges of their identities. It’s tautological that identity by category will involve some version or including or excluding things—it’s how these boundaries are defined. These boundaries are obliged to be fuzzy, transient, and deeply personal. Sometimes, it’s nice to have a reminder to step back a little bit and acknowledge that none of this is set in stone—it’s constantly evolving and changing as time goes on.
L: (鮮卑服) 武士陶俑, National Museum of China, Northern Wei // R: 彩繪文官陶俑，彩繪武官陶俑，National Museum of China, Western Wei
As an addendum: many of these cultures don't exist at all anymore. Historians have made their best guesses as to where they went, but there are so many extinct cultures that are just completely gone now—there's no backup drive for that. I want to share what little I can find with people, because there aren't any voices left to speak for themselves. I might mess it up a lot of the time, but I think it's worth trying, rather than just allowing all of it to fade into the past.
Design Notes
I'm still primarily trying to focus my efforts on Hanfu, what with Cloud9 being a hanfu brand and all, so the three designs for this category are based on silhouettes that I think were heavily influenced by hufu but still at some point worn by Han people. Also I need to tell everyone that I spent like a month researching Khitan clothing and then ended up going with Xianbei instead so now I just have a bunch of useless sources downloaded. Maybe I'll do a Khitan influenced design in the future, idk.
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馬面演變 / Mamian Yanbian / Evolution of the Mamianqun
If you’re here, there's a good chance you already know what a mamianqun is, at least vaguely. Mostly popular during the Ming and Qing Dynasties (Qing mamianqun look very different though), its main features are its pleated sides, flat skirt ‘doors,’ and overlapping two-panel construction. These days it’s probably the most trendy, well-known type of hanfu in popular media.
Obviously I had to include the horse-faced skirt in the Year of the Horse collection! It doesn’t really have much to do with horses beyond the name, but it’s like… iconic. Come on.
Mamianqun artifact [restored], mid-early Ming Dynasty, Journal of Silk, I lost the link sorryyyyy
Most people theorize that the mamianqun came from the Song Dynasty 旋裙 xuan2 qun2, also known as the 兩片裙 liang3 pian4 qun2, literally “two-panel skirt.” Obviously we can’t read the minds of every single person involved in the development of the mamianqun, but given the gradual appearance of mamianqun over time, this seems to be its most probable origin. I’ll go over the specifics more closely in the individual post for this set (which is technically 6 sets, I just like to torture myself and quadruple my workload for no reason I guess), but the mamianqun went through clear phases of development and trends over the Song, Yuan, and Ming Dynasties, which I wanted to compare.
Note: most people don’t consider Yuan Dynasty clothing to count as hanfu. I included it because I think it was an important step in between the Song and Ming Dynasties, and I’m trying to show a gradual evolution here. Feel free to consider the Yuan Dynasty version as ‘not hanfu’ if you’d like :)
Conceptual Discussion
Today’s world goes through so much change so quickly that it can feel impossible to catch up to, yet at the same time feeling like there’s an expectation that the newest and brightest is always the best. I would like to step back to appreciate the evolution that our world has gone through, and the myriad influences that have shaped it. I hope that, in recounting the changes that the world has already experienced, we can discover that change does not have to be as frightening as we expect it to be (or at least I do).
All that being said, this is probably the least wishy-washy philosophical category of the collection. I just did a lot of digging around for mamianqun-related information and wanted to present it, especially since so many people like mamianqun. I did pour like five hundred folklore easter eggs into the design, though, so whenever I get around to making a post about it I will be identifying and explaining those.
Fabric detail from one of the samples of my mamianqun design
This is the first time I was able to get yarn-dyed fabric (the kind of fabric where the designs are woven into the fabric with different colors of thread rather than printed on top) woven on demand. I’ll probably do a post on the back-end factory stuff at some point—it’s honestly pretty interesting—but there were a lot of barriers to entry that prevented me from being able to make yarn-dyed fabric, which is the basis of all the fancy, shiny, textured mamianqun fabric that bigger companies are able to produce. Experimenting with this definitely opened a new door for me design capability-wise and I’m excited to see what I can do with it in the future. You could say that this is part of my 'evolution' as a designer :)
Design Notes
龍馬圖, vectorization from 古今圖書集成 by 陳夢雷, Qing Dynasty, Wikimedia Commons
The mamianqun fabric that I ended up having woven was based on the folktale of 河圖洛書, which are two 'maps' (but like, abstract representations) that appear several times in the earliest Chinese folktales, primarily concerning prehistoric rulers like Yu the Great (the flood guy). They have a long-standing connection with Chinese cosmology, bagua, philosophy, etc. and also, uh, math! But generally the story goes that a 龍馬 long2 ma3 dragon-horse and a tortoise carried the Hetu and Luoshu on their backs from the Yellow River. Maybe I just needed an excuse to draw a dragon-horse, though, that shit's just cool.
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龍馬精神 / Longma Jingshen / Westbound
[Etsy]
It's a tote bag what do you want from me. I needed an 8th design and wanted to see if I could do something extra with the buzi lmao
