The trainer holds the horse by a rope, neither slack nor taut, while his young student circles at a gentle trot. Despite the towering construction project in the backdrop, the white fences, sheet roofs and late-afternoon trees still conjure a faint sense of the countryside.
Not far from the heart of downtown Shanghai, the YCL Riding Center is one of dozens of stables that have cropped up in China’s biggest cities. For affluent parents eager to educate their children as widely as possible, the sport can help meet the extracurricular requirements exclusive overseas universities expect.
Deborah Kay Gooden, a British trainer, helped to develop the programme at YCL, which was recently accredited by the British Horse Society. She recalls one camp where the parents were invited to watch the students “mucking out” the stables. “They were amazed,” she says. “They weren’t disgusted. I think they saw their children in a different light.”
Equestrianism is part of a 40-year embrace of European mores in China. A world away from the old estates, with their hunt masters and groomsmen, it is a now a status symbol in a nation where purchasing power has been transformed in the past generation.
A lesson, at over £100, is more than double the typical rate in the UK. The horses themselves are often flown in; Dutch carrier KLM provides specific services where owner and horse, which can easily cost upwards of €50,000, can fly together.
But such pursuits are now at a crossroads. The economy is no longer booming — one stable recently went bankrupt in Shanghai — while real estate prices have fallen and the new wealth of recent decades is more cautious with age. An unambiguous embrace of the west has given way to an era where domestic uncertainties are balanced against a new confidence in China’s own status and power.
On the surface part of a ferocious race for educational and social status, horseriding raises the question of whether an earlier wave of internationalisation will continue in China, especially as a trade war rages. It also hints at a terrain, transformed by urbanisation, where priorities are shifting towards other kinds of wealth.
When he opened his dressage stables close to Shanghai’s Hongqiao airport a decade ago, Mason Lee was swamped. “We were packed pretty much every single day,” he says. “The waiting list was about two months, that’s how full we were.”
Lee, who was born in Taiwan but grew up in Canada, had been the head of an international school and originally set up a programme that allowed autistic children to experience horseriding. He soon hired the best coach he could find — a dressage specialist from the Netherlands — and expanded his membership.
His venture had opened in the perfect place, at the perfect time. For prospective members, equestrian sports were not only a “high-end hobby”, something you could “show off” about, but they also helped with applications for overseas universities, including community-service credits. “They don’t want to accept a test machine,” Lee says.
The appeal of extracurricular activities is difficult to overstate in Shanghai, a city with famously high test scores, where parents fret over their children’s position in a future society that, if it differs as much as the China of their childhoods, will soon be unrecognisable. “Quite often they’re starting the sport because on Monday there’s a piano lesson, on Tuesday a golf lesson, on Wednesday a riding lesson,” says Alex Hua Tian, who represented China at the Beijing Olympics in 2008. Almost all of the children who are “consumers” of the sport in China “are coming from un-horsey backgrounds, urban backgrounds”, he adds.
At the YCL stables, founder Sophia Shen says parents’ money can go a long way in a sport with relatively few participants. One student recently spent Rmb2mn ($275,000) on an event in Wellington, Florida, including the horses and an entire crew. “He won a gold medal,” she says. “This is a small society . . . You don’t have a lot of competition.”
It is difficult to reliably estimate the number of stables in China’s biggest cities. Lee suggests there are roughly 60 stables in Shanghai now, and 30 that are “real stables”, given others are in shopping malls. There are also large numbers in Beijing, the nucleus of the sport in the 1990s and 2000s, and Guangzhou.
His own site is on a vast complex, where a fairground carousel marks the south-west gate. Two girls are training under a palatial pavilion. Other horses, several owned by members, rest in nearby stables, which are furnished with the finest hay from Canada. They include a mix of thoroughbred horses from the Netherlands and smaller Mongolian horses — China has its own rich tradition of horseriding in its northern and western provinces, where they are used for agricultural work rather than sport. “These are the horses that Genghis Khan rode all the way to Europe,” says Lee, pointing to one with a shoulder height of 150cm.
He has had approximately 2,500 members in total over the past decade, with the majority of children’s parents having lived or studied abroad themselves, and he says the appeal has broadened to include a greater stress on “soft skills”.
But a slower economic backdrop, now exposed to high tariffs from the US, has had an impact. “Technically speaking we have this huge untapped market, the potential is huge,” he says. “But the truth is, it’s tougher. It’s a lot tougher than before. We didn’t lose any money in the past 10 years — except last year.”
If Chinese society has, relatively speaking, moved closer to Europe in recent decades, horseriding was a late-stage adaptation. As the country reopened from strict communism in the 1980s, it was flooded with western products. Those who went often brought back with them part of the outside world.
That was the experience of Logos Hall, who left China in 1980 after he won a piano scholarship to the Juilliard School in New York and later entered the textile industry in California. He first rode a horse at the Flintridge Riding Club in La Cañada, north-east of Los Angeles, after a wealthy customer invited him for lunch. With the funds from his business, he tumbled into a world of hunting clubs and balls across Europe, where he sometimes performed as a pianist.
Logos is now chief equestrian trainer at Naked Stables, a trail-riding hotel near Shanghai. He recalls working at a stable in Suzhou in 2014, when he met other coaches from Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia, who had a “very different” concept of horseriding. “I had a hard time adjusting, even though I speak the language,” he says.
As well as an extracurricular activity for ambitious students, the appeal of horseriding in China is linked to a sense of gradual assimilation with the outside world. That appetite persists at many levels of society, despite an overarching sense of a decoupling — both economic and cultural — with a west profoundly changed from the 1990s and 2000s.
Direct European influence has also been dimmed by departures of expats during the pandemic, who are largely yet to return. Sigrid Winkler, formerly at the German Chamber of Commerce in Shanghai, set up a trail-riding business in 2022. Most of her clients are still foreigners, she says, but they also include Chinese women in their thirties and forties with office jobs. “They have disposable income and they want to do something adventurous,” she says.
Although the government in China does not champion wealth as overtly as it once did, with President Xi Jinping emphasising the need for “common prosperity”, it does promote elite international sports. In Shanghai, the government has built an equestrian centre that Hua Tian says is “probably the number-one city-centre venue” globally and which hosts events in May and October. Nearby Hangzhou has its own stadium.
Hua Tian, who learnt to ride in Beijing in the late 1990s, where his British mother was working for Proctor and Gamble as it rolled out consumer products in the mainland, says the sport is “perfectly placed to develop very quickly in China”, even if there is a “lack of regulatory infrastructure” for topics such as rider safety and horse welfare.
A lot of parents encouraged their children to do the sport six to 10 years ago because it was an “elite pursuit”. But many of them have seen a “shy, socially awkward child become a lot, lot more confident”. “There’s a large conversion from beginner to full family involvement,” Hua Tian adds. There is, moreover, a “yearning for culture and animals” in China.
But the significant expense of the sport, especially in an urban environment where it is not organically embedded into the hedgerows and countryside, has put pressure on parents. “In the past I had a lot more middle-class customers here, because they perceived themselves as going up,” says Mason Lee. “With the economy drop, the downgrade, all of a sudden . . . they realise they’re not rich any more.”
The same dilemma is affecting luxury brands in China, many of which host events at stables; Hermès, which started as a saddle-maker to European aristocrats, sends its local staff to learn to ride at YCL. As with horseriding, wider questions arise: how deeply was an earlier embrace of the west imprinted into the landscape, and how does it react to a changing economy?
For Logos, who says he never became wealthy himself because he “spent all his money on horses”, there is still cause for optimism. “That sudden boom, I doubt that’s going to ever happen again,” he says. But the sport has changed from “chaos” to something “more organised”: “I think it will continue.”
As for the horses themselves, they are “very sensitive”; riding them is a matter of “self-examination”. “They can feel,” he says, “the horse can feel the fly on its back . . . If we don’t control our own inner feelings . . . the horse knows it.
“You lose the communication,” he says, “when one party feels fear.”
Thomas Hale is the FT’s Shanghai correspondent
https://www.ft.com/content/8e466c88-43a9-4682-8dd9-0c0c30ef0df3
