Jiangwan Racecourse: Shanghai's Former Chinese Race Club Track

The first racecourse opened by Chinese people

Horse racing arrived in Shanghai with the foreign settlement community, and the first race there was held in the spring of 1848¹. For decades the sport was organized by and for the foreign residents of the concessions, and Chinese spectators and owners were largely shut out of the main club.

That changed in 1910, when a group of Chinese racing figures established the International Recreation Club and built their own racecourse at Jiangwan, a village in Baoshan County outside the city¹. This was the first racecourse in Shanghai created by Chinese people, and it gave Chinese owners, trainers and bettors a track of their own rather than a place in the stands at someone else's meeting.

The club was not the only Chinese racing body to appear in this period. In 1926 the Chinese Jockey Club was established in Yinxiang, a suburb of Shanghai, with purely Chinese members¹. The two organizations reflected the same impulse: a Chinese racing scene that ran its own meetings, set its own prizes and kept its own books.

Location and scale of the site: 1,200 mu at Wuchuan and Wudong Roads

The racecourse stood at Jiangwan, on land bounded by Wuchuan Road and Wudong Road, and covered roughly 1,200 mu¹. That is a very large tract by any standard, and it tells you something about the ambition behind the project. A track of that size needed a grandstand, stabling, a paddock, training gallops and the roads and tram links to bring crowds out from the city.

Jiangwan in 1910 was still a village in Baoshan County, not part of the built-up city. Putting a racecourse there meant building the venue and effectively creating the access to it. The choice of a large, cheap, open site outside the crowded center was the same logic that produced racecourses on the edges of most Asian cities of the period.

For comparison, the scale of racing grounds elsewhere in Asia varies widely. Macau's old racecourse was an oval track of one mile in circumference, with a turf straight of about 370 meters and a sand straight of about 320 meters². Japanese local racecourses run shorter, with courses from 1,000 to 1,600 meters³. Jiangwan's 1,200 mu was about the land, not the length of the straight, but it shows the room the club had to work with.

Racing, betting and facilities

Race days at Jiangwan followed the pattern of the sport across Asia at the time. There was:

• a card of races
• a paddock parade
• a grandstand for members and paying spectators
• betting on the outcome of each race

The club ran its own meetings and offered its own prizes.

The feature race was the China Gold Vase, created at the end of 1926 by the Chinese Jockey Club, with a beautiful trophy and unprecedented prize money¹. A race like that was designed to draw the best Chinese-owned horses and to make the point that the Chinese racing scene could stage a meeting to rival anything in the concessions.

The social side mattered as much as the sport. Race meetings were occasions for the Chinese business and professional classes to be seen, to entertain and to bet. The spring meeting of the Shanghai Race Club in May 1939 saw Mrs. Jack Liddell win the Champions with Rain, a reminder that the racing calendar in old Shanghai was a busy one with several clubs and meetings running through the year¹.

Betting at the track worked on the same principle as at racecourses across the region today: you buy a ticket on a horse or a combination, and the payout depends on the pool and the result. Modern Asian tracks show how the mechanics have been formalized. In Hong Kong, betting is offered at the Club's Sha Tin and Happy Valley racecourses, off-course betting centers and approved locations including the official website⁴. In Japan, betting tickets can be bought at the 10 JRA racecourses and the off-track betting facilities around the country⁵. At Jiangwan in the 1920s and 1930s, the same idea applied with paper tickets and clerks at the windows.

Destruction in the Battle of Shanghai and sale in 1939

Racing at Jiangwan did not survive the 1930s. When the Battle of Shanghai broke out in 1937, the racecourse was destroyed, and its management and horses moved into the Shanghai Race Club¹. The fighting and bombardment wrecked the facilities and ended horse racing at the site.

What followed was a slow unwinding. The Shanghai Race Club received the assets of the racing association and took control of the grounds, and in 1939 the racecourse closed and the land was sold to the Japanese-owned Shanghai Hengchan Company, which converted it into farmland¹. The sale was forced by unpaid bank loans, and the 1,215 mu site and its buildings went for 760,000 fabi in three installments¹.

The war scattered the racing world of old Shanghai. Owners, trainers and jockeys who had raced at Jiangwan either moved to the Shanghai Race Club's course or left the sport. The horses that survived the fighting were absorbed into other stables. By the time the war ended, there was no Jiangwan racing scene left to revive.

What stands on the site today

Nothing of the racecourse survives. After the war the land passed through different uses, and the area around Jiangwan became factories and housing as Shanghai expanded north and east. The last remaining racecourse buildings were demolished in early 2000 to make way for a residential development¹.

That pattern, a grand old track disappearing under the city, is common across Asia. The Guangzhou Racecourse site, opened in 1992, stopped racing and business operations in 1999 and was converted into a car city from 2008, later adding dining, fitness, entertainment and home furnishing businesses⁶. Some venues keep a piece of their history: the grandstand at Mumbai's Mahalaxmi Race Course is now designated a heritage structure⁷. Jiangwan kept nothing.

If you want to see how a racing ground of that era was laid out, the closest surviving examples are elsewhere in the region. Modern tracks in Japan, Korea and Hong Kong still run the same basic operation: a course, a grandstand, betting windows and a paddock.

For the wider story of the sport in the city, see History of Horse Racing and Betting in Old Shanghai. If you are interested in how old tracks are remembered, Gambling Museums and Heritage Sites in Asia covers racing museums and memorials, and Happy Valley Racecourse: History of Hong Kong's First Racetrack looks at a track that is still running.