Wooden Ox and Gliding Horse

Zhuge Liang’s Machines

Legendary self-moving transport of Zhuge Liang’s northern campaigns, lost to history.

The wooden ox and the gliding horse were the self-moving carriers that, according to the records, supplied Zhuge Liang’s northern campaigns. Later accounts describe a wooden ox that could walk and a gliding horse that could turn without fodder. No surviving machine matches the description, and the names have become shorthand for the lost ingenuity of the Three Kingdoms’ greatest strategist.