The government troops had not laid hold of half a bandit; all they did was take back the chest and catch the horse, and return in triumph.

The tone is dry. 不曾拿得半個 is did not catch even half of one, and 得勝而回 is the formal phrase for returning victorious — set side by side, they make the victory look like exactly what it is.

The commander, seeing that horse by lamplight — a fine horse:

A cue and a colon, and the chapter's last set-piece follows. The commander has recovered a chest full of monks and is looking at the horse.

Mane parted into threads of silver, tail sweeping like a cord of jade.

The second character of the tail's line is the rarest in the chapter and it needs explaining. It is built from the hand radical and a phonetic that gives it the sound xiǎn, and the old dictionary settles that reading outright by glossing it with a homophone rather than leaving a spelling to be worked out. The novel uses the character three times in all, always with a solid thing after it, always for one thing laid or swept along another — lips against the dirt, hair against a coil, and here a tail against a cord of jade. It answers 分 in the line above: the mane divides, the tail sweeps.

Say nothing of the eight steeds and the dragon colts — it outdoes the Sushuang and the easy-paced.

八駿 are the eight famous horses of King Mu of Zhou, the standard by which any horse in Chinese verse is measured. 驌驦 was a celebrated horse of the state of Tang, and 款段 is an old term for a slow-stepping mount, used in poetry with a touch of self-deprecation.

A thousand in gold for the bones; a wind-chase of ten thousand lǐ.

千金市骨 is one of the best-known stories in Chinese: a king wanting a thousand-lǐ horse sent a man out with gold, and the man came back having spent five hundred on the bones of a dead one — because word that the king would pay that much for a dead horse brought three live ones within the year. It is still the phrase for making your seriousness known. 追風 is chasing the wind, a name for a horse that outruns it.