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eastern promise located in a buoyant north chinese city, the Tianjin Goldin metropolitan Polo club offers its members outstanding facilities in an unrivalled setting, reports herbert spencer The polo world’s most iconic venue is the Campo Argentino de Polo at Palermo near the centre of Buenos Aires, home to the sport’s highest-rated tournaments. This national polo stadium is an unforgettable city venue with high-rise commercial and residential buildings of the Argentine capital forming a dramatic backdrop to the action. City polo venues are few and far between, but halfway across the world, a good 12,000 miles from Buenos Aires as the eagle flies, is one with a cityscape even more impressive than that of Palermo: the Tianjin Goldin Metropolitan Polo Club in China. Like those at Palermo, the Metropolitan’s polo grounds in Tianjin’s booming Binhai New Area have a backdrop of high-rise buildings completed or under construction. The difference is that, like so many things in China, the buildings are bigger – like the skyscraper Goldin Finance 117 that, when completed in 2015, will soar to just under 2,000 feet.
The Goldin Finance 117 tower and the polo club are both part of a mega-development of Goldin Properties of Hong Kong. Goldin’s 2,600-acre site will eventually be a complete city-within-a-city with office blocks, high-end shopping malls, luxury apartment buildings, town houses and villas, and extensive recreational facilities. The polo club was the first part of this massive development to be completed and it is obvious from Goldin’s promotional material that it is meant to be a sporting and lifestyle flagship to help attract the crème de la crème of China’s new business elite and international companies to the Binhai New Area complex. The city of Tianjin is 70 miles south of Beijing by road, but a 200mph bullet train takes only 30 minutes to and from the capital. In 2010 the GDP of Tianjin’s fast-growing Binhai New Area exceeded that of Shanghai’s landmark Pudong New Area for the first time. Goldin’s polo club is by far China’s wealthiest
and most ambitious project in restoring polo to the country in the 21st century. Polo was first played in China in the Han dynasty some 2,000 years ago, the Chinese having learned the game from Persian visitors. It flourished in the Tang dynasty during the seventh to 10th centuries. One can find artefacts from these periods in China and abroad, such as a colourful wall mural in Shaanxi and terracotta tomb figures of polo players. Westerners played the modern sport in China in the late 19th and early 20th centuries before the Japanese invasion, World War II and the Mao-led revolution. There was a polo www.hurlinghampolo.com
