For anyone interested in China and horses there’s hilarious reading on www.thelonghorseride.com. That’s the site set up by Megan Lewis, a Welshwoman riding between Beijing and London. When I met her in Beijing a few months ago Megan was about to go back for a winter break on her farm in Wales. She’ll be back in April to pick up the journey where she left off, at the end of the Great Wall in %. Lewis plans to arrive in Kazakhstan by summer. There she’ll saddle a new team of horses: bureaucracy and customs wouldn’t allow her take the Chinese steeds over. Apart from hilarious and frustrating run ins with local authorities (villagers she’s met along the way from Beijing are invariably curious and very helpful) Lewis has gleaned great knowledge about local breeds. I hadn’t for example known much about the Shanda, a stocky local breed which Lewis discovered on an sprawling breeding base in obscure Guangxi province which formerly bred horses for the army. China also has the Mongolian pony breed, and the Yili, a slightly taller steed from the China-Kazakh borderlands.
China's Equine Scene