In flat countryside about 25 miles north of Beijing, a 15-foot aluminium statue of a golfer in full swing marks the entrance to the Beijing Country Golf Club. Across the 36-hole golf course, at the end of a dirt track where fluff from poplar trees hangs in the warm air like snow, can be found a quadrangle of red-brick stables.
In this unlikely setting an exciting new chapter in the history of Chinese horse-racing is being written. The stables contain 12 thoroughbred mares imported from Ireland, 11 of which have just foaled in the last few weeks. If all goes well, when the colts and fillies are two or three years old, they could become the first pedigree horses from the Chinese mainland to break into the bigmoney racing scene in Hong Kong since the communist takeover of China in 1949.
Visitors to the stables are greeted by a cheerful young Tipperary man, Mr John Doherty, who since he arrived in February has delivered all the foals, the most recent on Saturday night when the mare Dissidence gave birth to a foal sired by Bigstone, a winner of the Queen Elizabeth II Stakes whose first crop of yearlings has fetched prices as high as 180,000 guineas in Ireland.
"They are a very good selection of brood mares," said Mr Doherty, patting the shoulder of a pregnant Anusha, which won £70,000 in nine races in Ireland and Britain, including the Ladbrokes Hurdle at Leopardstown, and will be the last of the 12 to foal in China. Its sire was Brief Truce, a champion three-year-old from Mr John Mangier's Coolmore Stud.
The Co Tipperary stud is providing technical assistance and managerial advice to the enterprise, which is a joint venture involving a Hong Kong off-shore international syndicate called Future Industries and a Chinese partner, Baiyinxile Livestock Farm.
Having bought the mares at public auction in Ireland, the syndicate's aim is to develop a livestock breeding industry in northern China which will produce classic China-born winners not just in Hong Kong but at other Asian and Australian venues.
"Maybe one day one of these foals will sneak their nose in front in Hong Kong," said Mr Doherty, as he led Satu Hiva out of its stable along with a six-week-old foal, also by Brief Truce. Mr Doherty, who comes from Ballynahinch, near Cashel, was assigned to oversee the foaling by Coolmore Stud and has six Chinese stable boys and two stable girls to help him.
Communist China is an unlikely base for the sport of kings, not only because of its political system, but because of a much bigger problem - the lack of calcium and other nutrients in the grass. Calcium is deficient in all organic matter in China, including water. For this reason horses cannot be bred successfully in China. The T'ang horses immortalised in Chinese pottery came from Uzbekistan, the Chinese steeds painted by the Jesuit explorer Castiglione were Kazakh or Afghan, and the common horses sold or raced in China over the centuries have been Mongolian ponies.
There is no calcium deficiency on the high Mongolian grasslands, however, and for this reason the joint venture has established its breeding farm, called Grassland Stud, at a location 16 hours drive north of Beijing on the plateau of Inner Mongolia, one of China's most remote provinces.
A first batch of six stallions and three fillies was brought to Inner Mongolia from Ireland two years ago. Next week the 12 mares and their foals will be moved in relays to Grassland Stud, where the spring meadows will soon be luxuriant. "There was no benefit in bringing them to Inner Mongolia before now," said Mr Doherty. "The grass is only growing now."
While the goal of the investors is primarily to be the first to break into the Hong Kong market, Grassland Stud is well placed to make a huge impact in mainland China if classic racing ever becomes a major industry here. As Hong Kong, Macau and Singapore have shown, the Chinese are natural gamblers and China has vast potential for a racing industry which in now becoming globalised. It is a capitalist money-spinner on which the market-oriented Chinese leaders are still missing out. But maybe not for long.
"It is possible that within the next 10, 15 or 20 years major cities such as Hong Kong, Shanghai, Macau, Shenzhen and Guangzhou will be competing against each other," Hong Kong Jockey Club's director of racing, Mr Philip Johnston, was quoted recently as saying.
The earliest records of horse racing in China show that there were meetings in Shanghai as early as 1848, when Roman Nose beat Kiss Me Quick in the Shanghai Hack Stakes. China's second city established a reputation world-wide for its fine course, its opulent grandstand, and fashionable crowds.
Horse racing was first introduced to Beijing, or Peking as it was then known, by diplomats in 1863, and attracted huge numbers of Chinese, Mongolians and Tibetans to what were described as the largest race meetings in the world. One of the sensations at the Peking races in the 1920s was a Mongolian grey known as Bengal, owned by the local Reuters correspondent, David Fraser, which in six seasons had 41 wins out of 42 starts and is rated as one of the best horses of the century.
The new communist government banned the sport in 1949 but in recent years racing with Chinese horses has been revived. New race courses have recently been completed in Shenzhen and Guangzhou, and a big project is under way in Shanghai. Regular meetings were reintroduced to Beijing in 1992 at a dusty track beside the Country Golf Club. The Beijing Jockey Club annually stages a Derby, worth about £20,000.
Officially there is no betting at Chinese races. Gambling was prohibited in 1949 as a "capitalist evil" and a slogan stretching above the finishing post at the Beijing course reads: "Resolutely Enforce the Central Committee's Strict Injunction against Gambling".
There are no form sheets or racing papers, but race-goers are allowed to get round the betting ban by paying at what looks like a tote window to "guess" the likely winner in the "Horse-racing Intelligence Contest". If they hypothesise correctly, they can pick up their winnings at one of the grandstand's "prize redemption counters".
Mr Doherty went along to take a look one day and decided to have a "guess". "I picked the healthiest looking horse before the race," he said with a grin. "It won and paid seven-to-one."
Two years from now, when the first Irish-Chinese fillies and colts race at the Happy Valley racetrack in Hong Kong, those who gambled on setting up Grassland Stud will also be hoping for handsome dividends on their investment.