You could be forgiven for thinking that last week’s Snow Polo World Cup 2012, the first to take place in Asia, was about sport.
A dozen teams charged around a snowy pitch, with mallets whirring and hooves thundering. Hong Kong’s players eventually took the crown by seven goals to four against a spirited South African team and there was much sweat, shouting and rippling of muscles.
But it was about much more.
The Tianjin Goldin Polo Club, the venue for the event, is the main recreational attraction in a massive development 130 kilometers from the centre of Beijing being built by Hong Kong-listed property developer Goldin Properties Holdings Limited.
The price of membership at the club starts at RMB 380,000 (US$60,300) and rises to RMB 10 million for patrons with their own teams.
It’s a sign of how keen China’s wealthy are to adopt elite sports as their own, and also of just how fast Chinese developers' ambitions are growing.
The scale of the development is staggering.
The 57-hectare site houses 2,000 residential complexes and a central business district that will boast a 600-meter, 117-story office tower, making it officially the ninth tallest building in the world.
The foundations for this gargantuan structure are still being excavated and are so deep that the cranes at the site are barely visible above ground level.
In the meantime, construction of the villa-style residential complexes continues apace. At night the blue flicker of arc-welding lamps lights up the building sites like electric stars.
For Edmund Ting, executive director of Goldin Properties, the development is as much a bet on the exponential growth of China’s cities as it is on the love of the sport of kings.
"It’s probably one of the biggest single developments in China at the moment,” says Ting, looking at a scale model of the finished city.
"The rental for premium office space in Beijing is very, very high and the new Shanghai-Beijing high-speed rail will stop in Tianjin,” Ting explains. “It’s similar to the relationship between New Jersey and Manhattan. We anticipate that a lot of people will move here and work here.”
As for the polo, it’s hoped to draw not just China’s crème de la crème but others on the international polo circuit, reflecting the exclusive nature of the development.
The purpose-built stadium and polo stables are already a fixture on the world polo circuit.
This year’s Snow Polo World Cup was made possible with almost 90,000 square meters of artificial snow -- outshining the 2011 event by five centimeters -- the extra depth the snow machines managed to churn out.
Since 2010 the club has hosted regular polo competitions for teams from across the world, attracting interested locals and a smattering of globe-trotting polo fans; the next big event is scheduled for July.
In an attempt to foster the growth of horse sports in China, riding and polo lessons are also run by the club. For many of the world’s polo players, the state-of-the-art facilities at Tianjin -– including rubber-floored, air-conditioned stables with scores of ponies worth around US$20,000 each -– are a dream.
As former professional polo player and head of polo for the Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Club Derek Reid says, polo is becoming more popular in China but, ultimately, the sport of kings will not be for everyone.
"You’ve got to have a bit of sugar behind you,” he quips.
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