Category: Horses in China

Beijing-based China Daily lately had a feel-good story about Maoyidong Bawudong, a Uyghur pear farmer turned race horse trainer in northwesterly Xinjiang province. The 63 year old spent US$22,000 on a “British breed racing horse,” which makes it the costliest beast in Heshilike Township, where Maoyidong’s stable of 12 is one of 400 (out of 1,500 households) raising racing horses.

The story comes at an interesting time: racing for gambling is banned in China – the horses are for “folk sport events,” reports China Daily – but there’s increasing hope that China will rescind its ban to reap the tax take that legalised betting would bring, particularly in straitened economic times. A ‘test race’ on the expensively built track in the centre-of-country city of Wuhan went well earlier this year and Hong Kong investors there are waiting for a green light for regular races with bookies in operation.

Back in Xinjiang, Maoyidong like most locals gave up their forefathers’ nomadic herding existence long ago to farm according to China’s socialist system. He hires a professional trainer for his horses, Wulun Bayier, a veteran of state-run Xinjiang Zhaosu Hourse-Breeding Farm, the largest supplier of bloodstock to China’s army in the 1970s. The farm still boasts one of the country’s largest varieties of horse breeds, according to China Daily reporting.

Prize money from Xinjiang races isn’t enough to pay the RMB6,000 annual upkeep for each horse and barely pays back the RMB25,000 he spent on a training ranch.

Racing and good breeding are matters of pride for local Uyghurs and ethnic Kazakhs, as anyone who’s been to the Sunday horse market in the old westerly city of Kashgar will attest. Favourite breeds include the local Yili, named for the town on the Kazakh-China border, and ponies from Mongolia, which borders Xinjiang to the north.

Local government grant-aids the racing festivals to the tune of RMB1 million – EUR100,000 – a year. China Daily also quotes local breeders/farmers as selling their race-winners to tycoons from China’s wealthy east coast. That explains the big shot I saw showing off to his friends tearing around a rough race track on a Yili earlier this year in Hangzhou, the wealthy lakeside metropolis south of Shanghai.

It was a long drive down to Daxing district last weekend to see a club that opened only last month, and which I’d heard of via an advert in the otherwise worn-out That’s Beijing magazine. Beijing International Equestrian Club, its Malaysian GM told us, was built by Messr Tang and Wang, two local tycoons – “in financial services.” It’s far more spacious and custom-built than other clubs I’ve been to in China, but then land in industrial Daxing (there’s a Kraft factory up the road) is cheaper and more plentiful than in Shunyi, where most of the other clubs, including Equuleus, are located.

The latter, usually booked out on weekends, is far busier than the Interational, but then this is a very new club, and it sets a new standard in quality and comfort – for horses and riders. After changing in the well-upholstered and rambling club house, I rode one of the European warmbloods, with instruction from a local trainer. The friendly 20-something from the northerly city of Changchun who assured me he was learning and living much better in his current job than he did in earlier gigs in other Beijing clubs. Interesting was the comment by the aforementioned general manager, Jim: each club horse does a maximum two hours work a day – “anything more is torture, other clubs torture the horses.” The fee’s alright: a package of five lessons for RMB1,500, though puzzingly you pay RMB600 for a one-off lesson. Obviously the package deal is intended to encourage return visits, as it’s a bit of a way out here.

The ad in That’s Beijing didn’t convince me – particularly since the club website address indicated doesn’t yet work – but the hour’s journey down to the Beijing International Equestrian Club has convinced me that investment and standards in China’s equestrian club scene are both still on a sharp upward curve.

I’m looking forward to re-visiting Hong Kong’s International Riding Centre later this month. Oddly, it was the only one of the three local clubs I called that welcomed me – the other two I phoned, on enquiring of my weight (88 kilos) said I was too heavy. That never happened me in Asia before, and I applaud the attention to horse health that it implies. Loated in the Northern Territories, near the border with mainland China, and just down the road from the site of the 2008 Beijing Olympics eventing competition, the Interntional Riding iding Centre is a neat well run establishment that looks small compared to the flashy new peers opening up in mainland Chinese cities. But the instruction standard is much higher, and the club appearence and management seems far better, from what I could see. A bilingual instructor, Edmond, took a far more demostrative approach to teaching too during my hour’s session on a horse retired from the Hong Kong racing scene. The price, at about US$30, was comparable to what I pay in Beijing.

There’s an equestrian club in Burma. Yes, 15-20 kilometres from downtown Yangon (previously Rangoon), the Yangon Country Club keeps 20 horses behind a rather lavish clubhouse. It’s imposing but underused, like many of the white elephant projects which have become synonymous with the military junta that runs the country (similarly, Yangon’s new interntional airport terminal is way too big for the traffic coming through).

Anyway, once togged out in the massive but largely empty and underfurnished clubhouse I got a 45 minute session in an indoor arena. Fee: US$12.50, or 13,000 kyats. The horse, I was assured, was local, a 7 year old gelding. All the horses in the stables appear to be locally bred – they’re light, nearly pony-sized and mostly chestnut and bay in colour. There’s a largely stables off a large meadow behind the indoor arena but the stables adjoining the clubhouse are unremarkable, simple bamboo poles fencing the horses in. Some of the cash spent on the clubhouse should surely have gone on stabling and an outdoor arena. My coach spoke limited English but was attentive and careful about the horses: this is the only club where I’ve been given a treat to give the horses: a little plastic sachet of what seemed like sugar cane cubes. I’m curious to know more about the Burmese breed, for the occasion when I may come back to visit the country’s other club, in the historic city of Bagon.

It was certainly hard to find: at the junction of Pyidaung Su and Pin Lon road, the club was opened in 2003 by Chairman of Myanmar National Olympic Council and government minister, General Khin Nyunt, along with sports minister Brig-Gen Thura Aye Myint. The President of Yangon Equestrian and Country Club is also a brigadier general, of police: Tin Win. More interesting is the Korean involvement: a brass nameplate in the clubhouse hallways credits COA International Co Ltd of Korea for co-building the club.

I ocassionally get sms alerts to my phone from the Beijing Turf & Equestrian Association, the local semi-governmental body that represents equestrian clubs in the Beijing region. The BTEA’s vice-chairman Yiu Kak moaned to me recently that it’s become increasingly difficult to organise competitions – which he believes are the only way of growing the equestrian industry in China – because the audience is small and there’s no cash from the traditional money spinner in Japanese and Hong Kong equestrian scenes: racing. Still, Yiu claims there are 75 equestrian (including the Beijing Jockey Club) clubs in Beijing, with 3,000 staff and 30,000 members. I find the latter figure hard to believe – unless we’re counting databases of people who’ve simply dropped by for a look. BTEA member Equuleus, a Beijing riding school nearly a decade in business, is doing alright: having added new stables and outdoor arenas they’re currently building a new clubhouse for members.

Yet another epic journey: China’s vastness lends itself to adventurers, usually European and American, biking or driving here from Russia or Mongolia. But Li Jing, a Chinese man living in Moscow, has made the trip by horseback. Somehow repeating the feat of various Mongol cavalries on the backs of nine horses he’s used for the 20-month trip. His arrival at the Great Wall – he’d planned to get here in time for the Olympics Games last August but was held up by the Siberian winter and police in Ufa who mistook him for a runaway robber – got him on the cover of the China Daily, the English-language journal of official record here. Li’s photo-op was probably conspired by the China Equestrian Association, whose officers, Li told the China Daily, has also given him the idea of riding back to Russia with Megan Lewis, who will ride from Beijing to London in time for the 2012 Olympics. We talked with Megan about her Long Horse Ride in an earlier blog posting.

It was with some delight that we discovered on a recent visit to Cambodia that there’s an equestrian centre in this war-scarred southeast Asian country. The recently opened Cambodia Country Club, on the road to Phnom Pehn’s airport, serves a clientele mixing rich local industrialists and officials with expat businesspeople and NGO workers. A smartly designed open air arena was busy when we visited, and after saddling up in the adjacent stables, enjoyed a good hour lesson with head-coach Ray Fisher, from Ireland.

From Kildare, the equestrian heartland of Ireland, Fisher teaches a majority-French clientele on a mix of retired racehorses shipped from the Bangkok racing scene and local red-brown Khmer ponies. His assistant Sim Nurith exercises the stock with a glint in his eye and an unmistakable devotion – Kim is one of several local kids introduced to horses by the Pitt Jolie Foundation: the organisation set up by two A-list actors (they’re also parents of a Cambodian orphan) gives impoverished locals assistance and training. Sim rides in a pair of wellington boots but longs for a size seven pair of riding boots. Maybe next time I’m in Cambodia I’ll bring him a pair.

Given there’s another club in Siem Reap, the German-run Happy Ranch, equestrianism may be making its way in Cambodia. Fisher however says local riders have to import everything – from saddlery to vets – from neighbouring Thailand, which has several large equestrian clubs. Tropical Cambodia, home to 11 million mostly ethnic Khmers, hasn’t had time to think about horses, given the decades of civil war and insane Khmer Rouge rule it’s endured for the past 20 years.

From northern to soutern China I’m often reminded of how much the Chinese prize ceramic horses. There’s an art shop cum café called Sancai in the modern art museum in Guangzhou named after the Sancai glaze used to cast the horses of the Tang period (618-907). These fine beasts (they look even more so in pottery) were brought in from Central Asia – the Fergana valley in today’s Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan – to add some strength to the imperial cavalry.

Central Asian bloodstock was depicted as the “blood sweating” horse. The Song and the Jin (1115-1234 AD and 960-1279 AD respectively) both spent treasure to build up their stables. A modern generation of Chinese blockbuster films glorify the period, putting national pin ups and pop stars into period battle dress to show off the skills of mounted warriors armed with crossbows.

Most people though will go back earlier, to the Qin dynasty (221-210 BC) for an even more impressive – and life-size – depiction of Chinese horses in clay: The life-size terracotta horses in the Qin royal tombs, unearthed and on display today in Xi’an city.

Chinese emperors and artists have for centuries been depicting horses in jade, marble, clay, bamboo and paint. The best works however died out when between the Ming and Qing dysnasties that cover the period 1368 to 1912, since horses were gradually being replaced with imported western guns.

The horse came to symbolize hope and courage in Japanese-occupied and civil war-torn China (not so often given the big-screen treatment) a place racked by war and hunger. Painters Li Gonglin, Han Gan and Zhang Ma became masters of mixing traditional Chinese ink painting and western oil effects. Chinese brush and ink artists prefer to paint bamboos and foggy mountains but Zhang Mu’s Horse Under a Tree, meant to convey the loneliness of war-ravaged China of the 1930s, is one of the finest examples of equine painting anywhere.

Zhou Xun and Zhao Mengfu both mastered the equine bodyline, though it’s not sure where they found the horses to paint: their studies don’t look like the rough Mongol and Yili breeds that were mostly all China had at the time.