A history of Chinese football

The evolution of football in China and JapanThe first game ever recorded, or at least the first that I could find, appeared in Chinese oral history about 5,000 years ago—that’s about the same time as Stonehenge and the Pyramids were being built. Unfortunately ancient oral history is a lot less substantial than stone buildings, and the older the story gets the more it’s regarded as mythology until eventually the two terms become interchangeable. But almost all myths ultimately have some basis in truth, no matter how abstract. And in this case it was one of the first stories to be written down when writing was invented a thousand or so years later, which lends it some degree of authenticity. As you would expect of a 5000 year old story, the details are sketchy. So I’ve pulled together what is known—which isn’t a lot, but it goes like this:A great battle was fought at a river valley called Zhoulu, between the yellow Emperor, Huang Di, and a coalition of his arch-rival, Chi Yu and his Nine Li tribes. Huang Di had been getting the worst of it for the ten years that the war had raged and, badly outnumbered, this was a final throw of the dice for him. As the battle commenced a fog settled over the river valley and Huang Di used it to his advantage by making so much noise that the enemy thought he had far more men than he actually did, and the noise confused them and worked on their superstitions to such an extent that when the fog suddenly cleared they were a frightened rabble and easily defeated.After the battle Huang Di separated his prisoners into common soldiers and officers. The thousands of commoners he pressed into service in his own army; the few officers who had not escaped or committed suicide he had beheaded. Chi Yu was captured as he tried to flee the field, dressed a common soldier and so bereft of honour and not worthy of the mercy of the quick death meted out to his officers. As a warning to any who would think to challenge his power, Haung Di had him skinned alive and his hide stretched as a practice target for his archers. He also had his stomach removed, stuffed with feathers and straw and given to his men to play football with. Finally Chi Yu was beheaded and his head paraded before the troops. Hard times, hard, cruel men.And that was the first game of football ever recorded—a bloody and murthering practice indeed!After Huang Di, history goes very quiet on football in Asia (or anywhere else, for that matter) for the next couple of thousand years, although it must have been quietly spreading across Asia during that time because the next vague reference to it is from around 3,000 years ago when the Japanese were playing a game that involved several people kicking a stuffed ball around with the ultimate aim of getting it into a hole in the middle of a large field. That’s the first reference to a goal and a definite purpose to the kicking. I can find very little information about this game, I can’t even put a definite name to it. It could have been a forerunner to the later Japanese game, Kemari, although they appear to be very different games. It’s more likely that it was imported from China and that that was how the earliest games were being played across Asia at the time—boisterous kickfests with few rules and one goal. The next time it appears, this time in the written records, is back in Western China about two and a half thousand years ago, when it was mentioned as a training exercise called tsu’ chu, or zhuqui, in a military manual called the zhan guo ce. It was written in the western kingdom of Qin during the ‘Warring States Period’, a violent period of Chinese history that lasted from 476 – 221 BCE and laid the foundations for modern China. It’s interesting that tsu’ chu is described as a training exercise for troops, because it was Huang Di’s troops who’d played football more than two thousand years earlier. This is a continuity that’s hard to ignore and it’s probable that soldiers in western China had been playing and evolving the game for all those years, and at some point its benefits were officially recognised by their generals. It’s also interesting that the Chinese and the Spartans—very different people living thousands of kilometres apart—were using the same game for the same purpose, training troops. I’m not sure if this could be called a coincidence. As I’ve said, I don’t believe in coincidences, but if it’s not a coincidence it means that the game was militarised right across the Steppes 3-4,000 years ago, before the Spartan’s ancestors migrated westward. The only other explanation is the significant contact between East and West during the Bronze Age. Tsu’ chu was destined to become a major sport that spread throughout China and, over about four hundred years, evolved from a rough-and-tumble game for soldiers into a game fit for genteel courtiers and Emperors. Then it survived for another thousand years through changes in dynasties, wars, famines and all manner of national disasters to become an obsession with Chinese of all social ranks, and its popularity spread to neighbouring Korea, Japan and Vietnam. But in the end, it couldn’t survive commercialism and its own popularity. But that’s getting well ahead of ourselves, so let’s go back to the start and the mighty kingdom of Qin.During the 2,000 odd years between Huang Di and the writing of the zhan guo ce manual, tsu’ chu had had ample time to evolve, for rules to be established, for a proper ball made of two hemispheres of leather sewn together and stuffed with hair and feathers to be invented, and for its benefits to be realised by astute Qin generals who saw the potential of the rough game as military training exercise. And at that time military exercise was foremost in the Chinese minds. The ‘Warring States Period’ was a brutal time when seven states vied with each other for total control of the region we now know as China. As with all wars, there was great suffering and great military innovation as each state tried to get an advantage. Their militaries grew massively as conscription saw forces of around 10,000 grow into armies of 200,000 and more. War became the sole reason for each state’s existence, death tolls were horrendous and whole regions were depopulated.But it wasn’t all bad, there was also a great deal of cultural exchange. As one state took over another, the victors didn’t just impose themselves on the conquered, they absorbed whatever they saw as good in the conquered cultures and adapted it to suit themselves. It was a two-way flow of knowledge and culture that led to significant advancements in commerce, art, agriculture and philosophy, all of which flourished under the disorder. A whole new method of government and new ways of thinking grew out of the violence, new ideas that questioned the ways of the past and sought to rationalise the horrors that had occurred. It was as if there was a backlash of civilisation against savagery.And when the fighting was over it wasn’t all roses. Ying Zheng, erstwhile king of the victorious western state of Qin, restyled himself Qin Shi Huang Di, First Emperor of China, and set about unifying China and making his mark on history. He built a network of roads that linked all of China and joined and strengthened disjointed sections of wall to make the first Great Wall. He also built himself an enormous tomb and guarded it with the famous Terracotta Warriors. But he was an absolute ruler, a brutal tyrant who organised society along military lines and pressed the population into massive public works where harsh conditions killed hundreds of thousands, probably millions of workers. All his works came at huge expense, both in money and the lives of a virtually enslaved population, and ultimately bankrupted the kingdom. The land was stripped of workers, food production plummeted and famine became the norm. But he was very good for football.Tsu’ chu was one of many new things that spread throughout the empire, and, perhaps, beyond. Itwas probably spread initially by the lower classes rather than the intelligentsia or the nobility, and its rapid rise in popularity was one of natural, and probably unstoppable, progression that may have gone like this: From its beginnings tsu’ chu’s value lay in it being both a military exercise and a morale booster, a way to keep the men occupied between battles. As former enemies were conscripted into Ying Zheng’s ever-expanding forces, more and more men would have learned to play. By the end of the wars there would have been hundreds of thousands of players, and when the soldiers went home they took the game with them. Football became public property and tsu’ chu, with all its skills and organisation and standardised (if relatively few) rules, spread to the four corners of empire where it was played at village level.In normal times it may have flourished briefly and then faded in the face of more gentle pursuits, but they were harsh times and the population was both militarised and oppressed. Tsu’ chu, with all its roughness and violence, changed from being a military exercise into an outlet for impotent rage, ideal for an enslaved population to vent its frustration without provoking retaliation from the elite. For that reason playing was probably encouraged by the government, it allowed the peasants to let off steam and diverted them from their miserable existence—very much like the role European soccer played in the late 19th and early 20th Centuries. Tsu’ chu (along with Central America’s ?llamaliztli, we’ll get to that)was one of the world’s first organised football codes and the world’s first overt and cynical use of sport as a social control.Because it was recorded in military manuals we know quite a lot about the first tsu’ chu games. They had two teams of twelve to fourteen players, each trying to get a ball of some description across the other team’s goal line by throwing, passing or kicking it. Rules were few and excessive violence the norm, but the Chinese have always had a genius for organising and creating order, or a semblance of it, out of chaos. In a precursor to changes that standardised and civilised the game, they introduced a defined field with a goal at each end. Unfortunately the manuals don’t tell us the actual rules of the game so there’s no way of knowing for certain exactly how it was played, but Qin’s was a society brutalised by generations of warfare and conditions were harsh, the population enslaved, volatile and frustrated so it’s unlikely that tsu’ chu was a gentle sport. A rough game is much more effective at releasing pent up frustration (in both players and spectators) than a gentile, rule-bound one. Not surprisingly, the Qin only lasted a generation and when they collapsed in 220 BCE and were replaced by the Han Dynasty, there was a fundamental shift in Chinese society. China has always been ruled by kings who based their rule on one philosophy or another, and the Han’s philosophy could not have been more different to the Qin’s. The Han followed the teachings of Confucius, which stressed humane attitudes. Love and kindness (ren) were considered the source of all virtue; harmony and the absence of conflict essential to proper order. The value of social ritual (li) was important, and with it the acceptance of each person’s role in an ordered society.There was no place for rough, violent sports in Confucian order and harmony. Football had to either adapt to the new philosophy or die. It adapted, new rules curbed the violence and the emphasis became more one of co-operation and structured harmony to reach the goal, rather than individual effort and brutality. The use of hands were outlawed altogether and a twelve goal version called juc hang introduced. The object of the game became to put the ball into one or more goals (jushi) rather than simple get it over the line.Why twelve goals? The answer, it seems, lay in the stars, or at least the Chinese concept of them. The universe was thought to be round and the earth quadrangular, so with the pitch (jucheng) a quadrangle and the ball a sphere the universe was suitably represented. The harmony was completed by introducing twelve goals representing each of the twelve lunar months in a year and standardising the number of players on the field to twenty four—twelve per team—to represent the twenty four signs of the Chinese Zodiac. Order was further imposed by introducing a referee (zhang) and linesmen (ping).But juc hang may have been a little too harmonious for the general sporting public because somewhere about this time a third code began to be played which reintroduced some of the rougher elements of old tsu’ chu and became known simply as cuju (which literally means ‘kick ball’). Goals were moved to the centre of the field (echoes of the old Japanese game?) and became two nets or sheets of silk, each with a 30 – 40 cm hole in the middle, mounted on long bamboo poles several metres above the ground. The two-goal version where each team had its own goal was soon replaced by a single goal. The aim was to kick the ball through the hole in the net while being pressed by the other team. I assume that this led to specialty players like defenders and strikers, just like modern day soccer.Why one goal? I can’t find any information about it so can’t say with any authority but, and this is purely guess work, perhaps it was that having one single goal was more in line with Confucian principles—everyone was striving for the same thing under the same rules, even though they were competing on opposite sides. Very symbolic, but however it came about the new game became a court favourite and was even played by the Emperor.Cuju remained a popular sport during the four hundred years of Han rule, but, as all dynasties do, the Han eventually came to an end in 220 CE and after four hundred years in power it imploding on itself in an orgy of internecine feuding, revolution and murder. Confucian love and peace remained the official creed, but it no longer seemed to apply to the ruling classes. Chaos reigned throughout China for another three hundred and fifty years in a period called the Six Dynasties, when rival Han warlords vied for control. This was an era of upheaval and insecurity not seen since the Warring States Period five hundred years earlier, but it was also a time of great cultural and technological advances. Things as diverse as printing and the wheelbarrow were invented. Buddhism replaced Confucianism as the religion of the masses and trade expanded as Chinese envoys spread out. To the east they visited Japan and to the west they visited the Greek controlled kingdom of Bactria in Afghanistan, where they realised the potential for trade with the Middle East and Europe, and the Silk Road began to be travelled in earnest. And it wasn’t just envoys that travelled to new places, the Han people themselves migrated as far south as Northern Vietnam taking their culture, including cuju, with them.And despite the chaotic three hundred and fifty years of the Six Dynasties, football thrived. Taken back from the elite by the people and readapted to suit their simpler needs, it reverted to a game for the masses, played to take minds off the hardships of everyday life. Eventually, in 618, the Empire stabilised again, this time under the Tang Dynasty, and that’s when football really came into its own. The Tang period was a golden age for China where culture of all descriptions, including football, flourished. The ‘net-with-a-hole-in-the-middle-of-the-field’ became entrenched, and then the Tang further enhanced the game with the introduction of a new style of ball, one that was much more easily controlled than the old one which was just two hemispheres of leather sewn together and stuffed with straw, hemp or feathers. That ball would have had very little bounce and been hard to kick any distance, let alone high and accurately enough to put it through a hole in a bit of silk.The Tang’s 7th C innovation was revolutionary, a more spherical ball made of eight shaped pieces of leather sewn around an inflated pig’s bladder. The new design made the ball lighter, more responsive and much more manoeuvrable. Top players could develop skills that would have been impossible with the old ball and new players were encouraged by their example.The new ball would have been expensive and not easily obtainable by the rabble, who probably still had to use the old style, but those rich enough to get the new ball became obsessed with it. The lightness and predictability of the ball spawned innovations that changed the game and spurred fundamental changes that ultimately led to the professionalization of the sport, which came to be known as Bai Da.Meanwhile, an elite and refined game called Zhu Qui[1] began to be played among the elite. It had different rules, employed different skills and was played for a different audience to the popular Bai Da. It was like Cuju had produced two sons, one a professional wrestler, the other a ballet dancer. Bai Da was undoubtedly an evolution of Cuju, but if Zhu Qiu was descended from it, it had inherited none of its physicality. It was a gentile game played at court for the entertainment of the Emperor and aristocrats, often during feasts on important occasions such as the Emperor’s birthday, where it was stylised with the emphasis on form rather than substance. Actually, they were probably completely different games with completely different origins because Zhu Qui looked very much like the Japanese game of Kemari. Zhu Qui was played by two competing teams, each of between twelve and sixteen people, but the emphasis shifted from direct competition to shows of skill. The object was to keep the ball in the air using the feet and legs, or any part of the body except arms and hands (think modern day hacky sack). Players from each team passed the ball to each other in the air, but if it touched a hand or the ground possession went to the opponents. Points were scored for style and difficult moves and there may have been a central pole—reminiscent of the original Japanese game were players tried to get the ball down a central hole in the field—that players were awarded points for bouncing the ball off and retaining control.It was played by all the rich from the Emperor down, and the capitol city of Chang’an was filled with Zhu Qiu fields in the grounds of the big houses and palaces. Courtiers and scholars formed teams and the Imperial Guard played against units of the army for the entertainment of the Emperor. Meanwhile, across the sea to the east, Kemari, was being played in a big way. Kemari was also a non-competitive game of skill initially played by the elite, from Samurai up to, and including, Emperors. It was just as popular with the elite class in Japan as Zhu Qiu was in China, as was is illustrated in an account in the 7th C Japanese classic, Nihom Shoki, that describes an incident in 644 when a prince lost a shoe playing a game. It was retrieved by another player, an act that led to a friendship which resulted in the two of them staging a successful coup the following year, and ultimately making the prince Emperor Tenji. Kemari was played by six to eight players on a square field about seven metres on each side. The ball (the mari) was made of deerskin that had been stuffed with grain and stretched into a hemisphere when the skin was wet. When it dried and set, the grain was removed and the shaped skin sewn together to make a light and tough ball. Players cooperated to keep the mari in the air by passing it backward and forward between players. One version appeared to have involved trees—cherry, maple, willow or pine—planted at each corner of the field and the players could demonstrate even greater skill by bouncing the ball off their trunks or branches and still keep it in play. Points were awarded not only for skill, but also a player’s attention to the etiquette and traditions of the game and deducted for bad form. Just like in China, Kemari clubs and schools were established and players wore uniforms specific to their club or school. The colour and pattern of a players socks denoted his or her social status and skill level—similar to the coloured belt grades in martial arts. By the 18th C the game had lost its elite tag and spread to the general population and was being played enthusiastically throughout the country, but during Japan’s push for industrialisation in the 19th C it began to fade as Japan rushed to adopt Western ideas and technology. It remained popular with some of the elite and the nobles pushed the Emperor to establish the Kemari Hôzô Kai or ‘Kemari Preservation Society’ so the game would not be lost and today it is played ritualistically on special festival days[2].Strong similarities and links between Kemari and Zhu Qiu are obvious, and we know that these links go back to before the ascension of the Tang Dynasty in 618, because an international game was played between China and Japan in 611, during the chaos that existed between the rule of the Han and Tang regimes. Clearly the games were very similar and the chaos wasn’t harming China’s international relations, or at least those between whatever faction held the East of the country and its eastern neighbour. An international match says that the game was already very well established so had probably been played in both countries for some time. There is a claim, unsubstantiated but possible, that a previous match had been played between the two nations as far back as 50 BCE. Around that time, give or take a couple of hundred years, Japanese mercenaries were fighting alongside Chinese troops on the Korean peninsula. Ultimately those mercenaries returned home and began the Japanese Kofun Period, a time of huge cultural development using many practises imported from both China and Central Asia, even importing whole Chinese clans to kick start industries such as silk production. The Samurai class became established with a hierarchical organisation similar to that employed by Central Asian warlords, the Imperial Family was founded and modern Japan was formed and somewhere, somehow, Zhu Qiu was either introduced to Japan, or Kemari to China. But which way? Perhaps it was both. Let’s say that Japanese mercenaries took their ancient game with a central target (a hole in the ground) to Korea and it was picked up by both the locals and the Chinese who were fighting there, The Chinese took it home, introduced a central pole and turned it into Zhu Qiu, which was reintroduced to Japan during the period when Japan thought all things Chinese were good. That’s just a theory and, anyway, it’s a moot point and it doesn’t really make any difference. But it does mean that Cuju was probably not Zhu Qiu’s direct ancestor and that Zhu Qiu and Bai Da were, at best, distant cousins. While the elite Chinese were addicted to Zhu Qiu, Bai Da went from strength to strength among the great unwashed. It retained the rough structure of original Cuju and drew huge crowds, commercialism and gambling. Players were public figures, lionised, idolised and demonised just as footballers are today. The lighter ball encouraged women to play and female teams were introduced—there was even a story of a teenage girl showing up a squad of soldiers with her skill, which probably went down really well at the time.Bai Da (Cuju) clubs employing professional players were founded in the major cities and towns, each with distinctive uniforms and their own organised fan base. A league was formed and competitive games scheduled, very similar to the way football is organised today. The game began to take on a commercial aspect because the clubs had to pay their players. One stream of income for clubs (or professional players) was from ‘apprentice’ players—any amateur who wished to play for a club had to pay a professional to train him (or her) before being allowed to play for a club.These radical developments may have been spurred by the invention of the new ball, but I think it more likely that the loss of Confucianism’s influence over the masses and the introduction of Buddhism, along with other religions and philosophies that didn’t stress harmony in all things, led to the rise in public popularity of Bai Da. Confucianism remained influential in the court where it discouraged outward competitiveness, or at least combative, activities (politics, assassinations, etc. aside) and encouraged displays of skills such as shown in Zhu Qiu.The Tang Dynasty came to an inevitable end and the land descended into chaos once more, although this time it was only about fifty years before the Song emperors took over in around 960, and both codes of football not only survived, they rose to new and glorious heights. Just how high they rose may be gauged by a passage inthe 14th-century Chinese novel Shi Nai'an(‘Tales of the Water Margin’), one of the four great Chinese literary works of thetime. In the book there is adescription of a Song official being appointed to high office simply because of his skill at Zhu Qiu. The court became increasingly absorbed by their game, which probably came to less and less resemble the rough, popular Bai Da. Meanwhile the general population became more and more enraptured with Bai Da and all that went with it.The ball was again improved and the norm became twelve pieces of hexangular shaped leather sewn together around an inflated pig’s bladder with a standardised weight of 600 gm (21 ounces)—don’t forget, all this was over 700 years ago! The rounder standardised ball allowed better control and players could reach even greater skill levels, and the crowds went wild. Both male and female teams competed professionally under an over-arching body known as the ‘Clouds High League’, and crowds in the tens of thousands turned up to watch high profile games. The sport became a national obsession.Sound familiar?The Song Dynasty came to an abrupt end in 1279 when the hordes of Kublai Khan invaded, but Cuju survived. Or at least the rough Bai Da did, it’s difficult to imagine the refined Zhu Qiu being appreciated by warrior invaders—although Kublai Khan was known to be fascinated by all things Chinese, so it may have been. At any rate, the Mongol tribes appear to have been fascinated by Bai Da. They even invented their own version. The Mongols were passionate about ice skating in all its forms, from racing to figure skating and acrobatics on ice, but to them skating was, like the original Cuju, a military exercise and a vital part of a warriors training. So what could be more natural than to adapt Cuju to ice? It would have involved very great skill to kick a ball while wearing ice skates (perhaps it would be good training for modern day soccer players?) and the game was carried westward by the Golden Horde, where it found a home in Russia and Scandinavia. Ultimately feet were replaced with sticks, although whether this was by the Mongols, the Russians or Scandinavians is still debated, and the game became known as ‘Bandy’ from which we now have ice hockey[3]. The Mongol Yuan Dynasty didn’t last long, only eighty five years, until it was overthrown by the Ming in 1368, and under the Ming, Bai Da began to lose its lustre. Why? What changed that caused the decline of such a popular mass participation sport that had been developing and growing for two millennia through good times and bad, through wars, famines and maladministration? As it turns out the answer, like much of ancient Chinese football, has surprisingly modern parallels. The over simplified answer is that the first Ming Emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, banned it. But, as I said, that is a serious over simplification. Zhu Yuanzhang was a very capable and very intelligent man, but also a very unlikely candidate for Emperor. An ethnic Han Chinese who was born into poverty, he spent his childhood as a homeless, orphaned beggar. As a youth he lived in a Buddhist monastery for a time before joining a rebel militia where he rose quickly to become a commander and ultimately ousted the Mongols and became Emperor Taizu. But he had acquired the throne in very difficult times. In 1331 plague—the Black Death—struck northern China and killed around 90% of the people. That was the start, the epicentre, of the worst pandemic in history, one that ultimately spread right across the Eurasian landmass and killed an estimated one third of the population. Its spread was made possible by the Mongol’s vast empire with their rapid lines of communication and, more importantly, their interconnected, safe and very well used overland trade routes (the Silk Road). When the plague reached the western terminus of the empire it simply took ship and sailed into Europe.In China, just as in Europe and other agrarian populations, there were not enough people left to work the land and famine added to the misery, making the 14th probably the worst Century in human history. Hardship spurred unrest which ultimately led to the overthrow of the seriously weakened Mongols.The Empire that Zhu Yuanzhang took over was not a happy one. The plague had had 37 years to become established and wreak havoc throughout the realm, natural disasters and famine had added their bane to life and the population must have been seriously restive. It was for good reason that Zhu Yuanzhang was regarded as a harsh and suspicious ruler.In the meantime football must have suffered from the loss of both players and administrators, not to mention fans. This wasn’t like earlier times when hardships were caused by war and oppression and a good, hard game could let off steam. This was a time when gathering in crowds could be fatal.It was probably the pandemic that crippled Bai Da, but it was the Emperor that dealt it the fatal blow. He banned it, quite possible as a public health measure because games would have been one of very few, if not the only occasion when people congregated in huge tightly packed crowds and became, in modern parlance, super-spreader events. But there were undoubtedly other factors that contributed to the Emperor’s decision. His upbringing suggests that he was not averse to football per se, but the presence of powerful and popular Bai Da leagues were probably not to his liking. They commanded huge popular followings that, to the suspicious mind, could be easily turned to political intrigue and insurrection.To be fair, Bai Da did not help itself. It had become corrupt and associated with the under-belly of society. Officials and workers were neglecting their duties and wasting huge sums on gambling. It was even said that brothels sponsored teams of prostitutes to attract customers, although how much of that was true and how much was invented by palace eunuchs and misogynistic advisors is questionable. Officially organised Bai Da ceased to exist publicly and, after two thousand years of almost continuous growth, popularity and Imperial approval, the sport of football went into very rapid decline and by modern times was, supposedly, virtually extinct in China. But I think it unlikely that something as universally popular with millions of people would simply lie down and die overnight. After all, it had survived more hardships and regimes than it could poke a stick at and, although the extreme rigours of late 19th and early 20th Cs China may have administered the last rites, we know that it survived in neighbouring Korea where they still have a version called jokgu, so it’s probable that in the early 19th C it was still being played at a grass roots level China.And a version migrated to SE Asia where it exchanged the leather ball for a light, hard ball fifteen to twenty cm in diameter made of woven rattan, and became known as sepak takraw. Sepak takraw is a fascinating, very energetic and very highly skilled sport that’s played fanatically from Vietnam in the north to Indonesia in the south, from the Philippines in the east to Myanmar in the west. And it’s not just in SE Asia, the sport’s been picked up right across the world in one form or another, especially in Brazil and Portugal where the rattan ball is replaced with a modern round football and it’s called Futevôlei (Footvolley). The earliest positive reference to Sepak takraw is from the ancient city of Malacca on the Malay Peninsular in the 15th C, (someone accidentally hit the Sultan’s son with a sepak takraw ball and knocked his hat off. It cost the kicker his head), but it was undoubtedly played for some time before this. The sport’s official website says that it was played in the Philippines, Brunei, Myanmar, Indonesia and Laos as early as the 11th C. There’s no actual proof of this that I can find, but it’s quite possible because at that time a huge and very powerful Sumatran maritime kingdom called Srivijaya dominated the region, and it had very close ties with first the Tang, and then Song China—right through the centuries when both Bai Da and Zhu Qiu, were at their most popular. Srivijaya was frequented by Chinese merchant, diplomats, adventurers and occasionally soldiers, so it’s inevitable that their games came with them.In the 14th C Srivijaya collapsed and regional trade was seriously threatened because one of Srivijaya’s roles was to protect shipping in the Malacca strait. At the time China had extensive trade with India and the Middle East, so to protect that trade China sent ships and troops to intervene and Chinese presence in the region increased significantly. These were rough soldiers and sailors who undoubtedly played Bai Da, possibly even as part of their training, and the sport would have received a major boost in the region and spread very rapidly until it reached the Buginese of Sulawesi, the pre-eminent sailing and trading people of SE Asia at the time. The Buginese adopted it enthusiastically under the local name raja, and took it to the remotest parts of the Indonesian and Philippine Archipelagos.It probably even reached Northern Australia, it would be surprising if it didn’t because Arnhem Land and NW Australia were a part of the Buginese trade network for most of the last thousand years and were sites of intense Buginese (Makassan) activity. But despite the close and intense relationships between coastal tribes and visitors, the coastal clans extensive travel to SE Asian cities and their adoption of many foreign customs, games and vices such as smoking, alcohol and cards, it appears to have left no trace on the mainland. Perhaps missionaries discouraged football for the same reason that it was banned by the Ming—it was too difficult to control. Or perhaps it did take hold in a big way and spread along trade routes and corrobboree through the country, was modified as it went and became known as the Australian native game, Marn grook, and perhaps it was lost in the north during the great disconnect caused by the huge epidemics that swept the Aboriginal world in the early 19th C.Today Cuju is recognised by the Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) as an original ancestor of the modern game of Association Football (Soccer) because it was the first sport, apart, perhaps, for the unknown Japanese game from three thousand odd years ago, proven to explicitly forbid handling the ball.It had survived and thrived in its homeland for millennia, but like many old families, it fell on hard times at home but its offspring migrated to new pastures where they thrived. Such can be the nature of families.[1]A word of caution is needed here. I have browsed several references to Zhu Qiu and Bai Da and they seem to be split as to which name refers to which code of Cuju. I have taken what seems to be the majority decision and called Zhu Qiu the refined one and Bai Da the populist, but it could well be the other way round. In the long run it makes no difference, they’re only names.
[2]US President Bush caused great insult when, on an official visit, he intruded on a demonstration game of Kemari and began kicking and heading the ball. When ushered off the court he was heard to mutter ‘we won’.
[3]That will be disputed by almost every nation that plays modern day ice hockey, all of whom seem to claim to have invented the sport.