Racecourses catalyzed early social life
Print Edition
ON May 6, 1911, the Jiangwan Horse-race Club was opened. Its founder and owner, businessman Ye Yiquan, invited bigwigs from foreign consulates and local politicians to join the ceremony. Thousands of nearby residents gathered with curiosity. The crowds of people, cars, horse carriages and rickshaws jammed the roads for hours.
The ceremony started with a French pilot’s performance — making turns and circles. For many ordinary Chinese at the site, it was their first time to see an airplane performance.
The horse race club was the first one owned by a board of Chinese trustees (Ye held a Japanese passport), although foreign businessmen joined the board later. It soon attracted many wealthy Chinese businessmen, who were previously excluded from Shanghai Race Club, an expatriate-only private club founded in 1850. Many expatriates were also attracted to this new club.
It was said Ye founded the club mainly to take revenge on the Shanghai Race Club that repeatedly rejected his application. The wealthy Chinese got a Japanese passport in order to bypass the rule to recruit only foreign members, but he was rejected by the club. Later, he joined some race clubs in Hong Kong, hoping to set precedent as a Chinese member, but was rejected again.
It was only in 1909 that Chinese were allowed into the horse-racing lottery, let alone to become club members. Even the most powerful or wealthy Chinese were invited only to watch the races at times.
Feeling humiliated, Ye invited a handful of friends and business partners to found their own race club.
It was just before horse racing and the lottery business peaked in Shanghai in the 1920s and 1930s, about 70 years after five British merchants — W. Hogg, T. D. Gibb, Langley, W. W. Pakin and E. Webb — first started the club in 1850, less than 10 years after the city opened port to foreign trade. In 1851, the first race was held.
At first, they built a small track 500 meters long, a part of today’s Nanjing Road, which was soon extended into a multifunctional venue that included a track on the exterior circle and a playground that contained a baseball field, golf course, swimming pool and tennis court inside the circle. Chinese, who were banned from the venue at the beginning, called it a ball-throwing ground since they saw expatriates throwing balls to each other there all the time.
The area, which housed only about 500 residents at the time, soon became the most crowded and prosperous place in the former concession. The race course was sold — at several times its original price — four or five years later, and a second course was built at today’s Zhejiang Road.
Again, as the property price rocketed in the 1850s, with an average increase of 200 times between 1852 and 1862, the second course was soon sold.
The third one was even larger and wider and included what is now People’s Square, a landmark of the city. The club owners also built the headquarters just beside the course. The building survives today. It held the Shanghai Art Museum until 2012.
Stables were also built near the race course. One such stable survives to this day, at No. 20 Weihai Road, amid a few tall buildings. The house, now a residential building shared by a handful of families, is still equipped with the stable door that is divided into two parts vertically, a relic of its original use.
In this spot business expanded rapidly and soon become one of the most profitable businesses in the city, especially after the Chinese people were allowed to buy lottery tickets after 1909.
Championships were held twice a year, in spring and fall, and the top trophy was the world’s ninth in ranking. The race club became one of the world’s most powerful private clubs as well as one of the biggest and richest clubs in town. It put many big foreign names such as Victor Sassoon, Eric Moller and Catchick Paul Chater on its executive list.
The top prize was nearly quarter of a million, while the chance was one in a million. A race ticket costs five bucks, and champagne tickets, the most popular lottery ticket among Chinese, were 10 bucks each. Many poor Chinese, hoping to get rich through the races, spent all their income on these tickets.
Horse racing was a big part of the city’s entertainment and social life. In 1920, a young and well-bred man called Yan Ruisheng, who graduated from a top university and worked at a foreign firm with a high salary, made headlines in all the city’s newspapers.
The young clerk, a gambler since his teenage years, lost all his own money and money lent to him by others, in the races. Through a good friend and businessman, he was introduced to a top-notch courtesan, who impressed him with her precious and expensive jewelry.
Yan soon conspired with a friend to trick the courtesan into accompany them to a suburban area, where they killed her and took all her jewelry. Yan was found and arrested in Jiangsu Province, and was soon convicted and executed.
The story of Yan, a reflection of the consequences to the thousands of Chinese who were addicted to horse racing, was soon adapted to stage and film. The two-hour movie, “Ran Ruisheng,” was released in 1921 as the first long feature film in China. It didn’t take long for it to become a blockbuster.
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