BRITISH SPORT PAST AND PRESENT 



' To jump on a horse and swing a club, galloping madly here 

 and there with no distinction of rank, but only eager to be 

 first and win, is destructive of all ceremony between sovereign 

 and subject.' The risk of accident was also urged. ' The 

 Emperor sighed over its excellence for a long time ' when this 

 memorial was handed in. What his Imperial Majesty said 

 concerning the relative importance of ceremony and polo, 

 unhappily, has not been recorded ; but perhaps we can guess. 

 Professor Giles has unearthed a brief description of the game 

 as played by the Tartars, to whom China is thought to have 

 owed introduction of it : — 



' The players mounted well-trained ponies, and each one was 

 provided with a club (ball-staff) of a good many feet in length 

 and shaped at one end like the crescent moon. They were 

 then divided into two teams, the object of contention to both 

 sides being a ball. Previously, at the south end of the ground 

 two poles had been set up, with boarding in between, in which 

 a hole had been cut, having a net attached to it in the form of 

 a bag. That side which could strike the ball into the bag were 

 the winners. Some say that the two teams were ranged on 

 opposite sides of the ground, each with its own goal, and that 

 victory was gained by driving the ball through the enemies' 

 goal. The ball itself was as small as a man's fist, made of a 

 light but hard wood and painted red.' 



Perhaps there were two varieties of the game, and the latter, 

 being the better, outlived the single goal and net-bag arrange- 

 ment. However this may be, the latter is the game played by 

 the Chitralis and other frontier tribes, including the Munipuris, 

 from whom we learned it. 



Polo was first played in British territory by the planters 

 in the tea districts of Cachar in 1854-1855. The tea-planting 

 district was full of Munipuris who had settled there, political 

 refugees from their own states. These had brought with them 

 among other things their polo ponies, and each group of villages 

 had its own little club, a circumstance which naturally pro- 

 duced frequent matches. In the early 'fifties, when the planters 



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