Ice Hockey in China
- Jennifer Day
- 7 days ago
- 4 min read
Because my son has been interested in hockey for some years now, I have found myself wondering what the history of hockey looks like in China. Today hockey culture in China is highly elitist, largely restricted to extremely well-to-do families in metropolitan cities such as Shanghai and Beijing, in part because of the cost in training, equipment, and travel for games.
When did hockey first come to China, and how was it played?
Besides the connection with my son, there was a deeper personal reason I wondered about these questions. When my father was growing up in Harbin in the 1950s, his grandfather would flood their backyard each winter to make an improvised rink. He would also make their own hockey sticks by hammering two flat wooden boards at an angle. Proper hockey skates were hard to find, so they bought the only skates available in town -- speedskates, which were much longer and harder to maneuver. The experience was novel and exhilarating, and it became the highlight of my father’s childhood.
My dad told me this story many times. Yet it always struck me as somewhat unlikely that an ordinary Chinese working family would not only know about hockey, but love it enough to build their own rink and equipment. Hockey was not an elitist sport, at least not in the 1950s. On the contrary, because ice was a natural resource and outdoor rinks were easy to make, it was widely available to ordinary families.
I did some digging in the news archives and sketched a quick history of the sport in China. I had always assumed that the Soviets introduced hockey to China after 1949. What I found overturned that impression.
Hockey appeared much earlier, not long after it became a modern team sport in 1875. British expatriates started making their own rinks as early as the 1880s in Shanghai. The first organized presence was associated with the Shanghai Hockey Club founded in 1901. Four years later, the Tientsin Ice Hockey Club was founded by British and American expatriates W.H. Hunt, R. G. Buchan, W.J. Warmslay, and R.H. Chandless. Their first game was played on a frozen pond. Within a few years, the British and American legations and the US Marines co-organized the Peking Ice Hockey Club, the second semi-professional hockey team in China. A third team consisted of Japanese players associated with the South Manchurian Railway Company. These three teams competed for the Wharton cup, a silver insignia donated by J. Fenton as a permanent challenge cup. According to the China Press In 1921, the four teams were invited to compete: the 15th Infantry, the Peking Marines, the Peking International and the Peking Hockey Club.
Hockey also took off as an intercollegiate sport. Many schools in north China introduced winter sports in an effort to modernize their curriculum in physical education. It was extremely common for schools to flood soccer fields in the winter and convert them into hockey rinks. By 1931, 37 games were held by universities in Beijing alone.
I was surprised to find photographs of the so-called "mask skating" where people wore elaborate costumes while skating. The man in the middle is skating with a full Peking Opera costume. It couldn't have been easy but he's handling it with such composure.
After Japan’s invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Nationalist government in Beijing (known as Beiping) organized winter sports events to mobilize patriotic participation. These competitions provided a platform where patriotic athletes from the Manchurian provinces under Japanese occupation could be symbolically reunited with their national compatriots. In 1934, hockey players from the Northeastern provinces captivated the more than 2000 onlookers with a striking jersey design, featuring white above and black below, symbolizing the land which the Chinese patriots were called upon to reclaim from Japanese invaders. Each team banner also featured outlines of each province’s map painted at the center against the white/black design. According to a journalist from Beiping chenbao, “Looking toward the Northeast, mountains and rivers have changed color; the northern land resounds with cannon fire, wave after wave. Our rivers and mountains—when will we reclaim them, in what year and what month? Seeing the clothing and banners of these sturdy youths, one could not help but shed tears” (Xu Wendong and Zhu Zhiqiang, Zhongguo dongji yundong shi, 30).
So, hockey was a vehicle through which the Chinese government promoted patriotic resistance. There’s more to this story, of course. Apparently, both the Japanese puppet regimes and the Communist government in Yan’an also organized their hockey teams, but I don’t think they ever competed in the same tournaments.
A few more photos from after the establishment of the PRC.
