CHINA'S short flirtation with horse-racing may be over, but ARTHUR HACKER looks back to the days when the sport thrived as the British were granted trading concessions at major mainland ports.
HORSE-RACING has been forbidden in China only eight months after its revival at new racecourses in Guangzhou, Beijing and Shanghai. But at the beginning of the century the pastime was ended rather more forcefully.
Beijing then had its own racecourse. It was reported to be the largest in the world at the time. Only when it was burnt down by fanatics of the cult of the Righteous Harmonious Fists in 1900, did the West take the Boxer Rebellion seriously.
According to the Hongkong historian Austin Coates in his fascinating book China Races, about the sport of kings and coolies, the East India Company staged the first English style race-meeting in Macau around 1798-9 at Hak Sha Wan, a black sand beach, about three-quarters of a mile long.
The perfidious British surreptitiously started building a ''road'' in 1802 in Macau which was really a racetrack. Unfortunately it soon became known as Horse Road and its real purpose could not be concealed from the Chinese for long. The Mandarins objected loudly.
''The Horse Road is forever prohibited. We will maintain the Laws immovably as a mountain; positively not the least indulgence will be shown. You must all tremblingly obey! Do not oppose!'' It sounds today a bit like a New China News Agency press release on the Hongkong's new airport.
As Coates points out: ''By this time, of course, the road was built. It was the best road in Macau.'' Today it is called Rua dos Cavaleiros and is near the Luis de Camoes Museum.