In 1857, British journalist George Wingrove Cooke had only recently returned from documenting the Crimean War when his editors at The Times of London gave him a new assignment: travel all the way to China. Britain and France were in the midst of fighting the Second Opium War against the Qing Dynasty (1644–1911), so he embarked on the long voyage from one end of the Eurasian landmass to the other, eventually reaching Victoria Harbour and the nascent British colony on its shores.
He was surprised at what he saw. “The first great astonishment,” he wrote, “is to find many merchant-princes living in many gorgeous palaces, a city two miles long, every article of home luxury except a bracing breeze, and fleets which could feed a principality and conquer an empire.”
The opium trade had already made many European merchants in Hong Kong very rich, but there were very few forms of entertainment for this new gilded class to spend their earnings – except horse racing. “It is the single holiday of the merchants,” noted Cooke. “They spend weighty sums in importing horses from all parts and training them for the contest. We may smile at this truly English mania struggling against strong discouragement; but the means of amusement are not numerous at Hong-Kong.”
Happy Valley racecourse, 1840
The races took place in the only substantial piece of flat land on the entire island: Happy Valley. After a devastating outbreak of malaria convinced the colonial government to abandon its plan to transform the swampy valley into a grand civic centre, the colony’s burgeoning elite decided it would make a fine spot for equestrian appreciation. They bought the rice and sweet potato farms that occupied the valley floor and drained them into the muddy stream that traversed the marsh, dredging it to become a six-metre-wide, 3.6-metre-deep channel called the Bowrington Canal, after the waterfront settlement named in honour of John Bowring, the fourth governor of Hong Kong. In December 1846, Happy Valley played host to its first horse race.
Before that, Hong Kong’s racing enthusiasts had made regular pilgrimages to Portuguese-controlled Macau, which had hosted horse racing since the 18th century. They had managed to stage a race in Pok Fu Lam in 1845. But the races in Happy Valley, held annually around the lunar new year — generally the coolest and most pleasant time of year — proved enduring. A decade after the first race, Cooke observed the excitement that gripped the European and Chinese populations alike on race days.
“When we first see the racecourse in the ‘Happy Valley’ we are half-tempted to declare that it is the most picturesque spot in the whole world,” he wrote. “The scenery, however, must not distract our attention while Snowdrop is making the running. The Grand Stand, and the booths, and the stables, and all the properties of the turf, and by no means forgetting the luncheons and the champagne, are all in first-rate order. The one and a half mile road between the ‘Happy Valley’ and the city of Victoria is at the proper time crowded with vehicles and horsemen and pedestrians, and sometimes the pace is rapid, and sometimes one of the party blows a horn.”
None of this would have been possible without the unique topography of Happy Valley, notes Anita Chung, Tai Kwun’s director of heritage and curator of the exhibition Happy Valley: A Cultural Landscape. “This open space nurtured different kinds of cultural activities,” she says. “Not only horse racing, but all kinds of sports.” Though Happy Valley has become synonymous with horse racing — and the Hong Kong Jockey Club, founded in 1884 — its open space also nurtured an athletic culture that thrives to this day.
East Point, Happy Valley, 1900
For many years, Happy Valley offered the only publicly accessible recreational space in Hong Kong, which opened inside the racetrack in 1890. As Zolima CityMag contributor Tobias Zuser notes in his history of football in Hong Kong, athletic clubs proliferated in the second half of the 19th century, “but for anyone without a membership, Hong Kong had little to offer in terms of public space, except for the green fields within the racecourse in Happy Valley.”
At least in the beginning, these infield spaces were used mainly — in the words of one contemporary observer — by “a handful of European schoolboys and a few ragamuffins of the lower order of Chinese.” There was a pervasive sense at the time that Hong Kong’s Chinese population turned their nose up at any kind of sport. “They are not a playing people as playing people are known in the West,” wrote the observer.
But things were changing. One of the colony’s prominent Chinese families, the Weis, produced some talented athletes, including Wei Wing-lok, who won the world doubles tennis championship in 1914. It was around that time that a group of Chinese students founded a new football team that would welcome Chinese players, unlike the all-European Hong Kong Football Club that had been founded in Happy Valley in 1886. The team grew into the South China Athletic Association, which in 1927 leased a patch of land on Caroline Hill — a short distance from Happy Valley — from the government.
Happy Valley racecourse, 1971
Happy Valley continued to anchor the development of Hong Kong sport. The racecourse’s infield was used for golf, football, cricket, field hockey and polo. Even as the horse racing facilities have been continuously expanded and upgraded, the infield is still used for public sport and recreation, with space for football, rugby, lawn bowling and running. The organisations that grew out of Happy Valley have helped develop and sustain sport in Hong Kong – even as far as sending its own team to the Olympics.
“Nature has provided in this valley a most suitable and picturesque site for a park; just such a site as every traveller in Greece and Italy knows would have been selected by the ancient Greeks and Romans as a stadium for the display of their national games,” declared then-governor George Ferguson Bowen in 1885, when he revealed plans to make the infield accessible to the public. That legacy remains alive today.