Round Ball in Beijing

We know that football came to China early, in 1877/8 and with a team, the Shang'hai Engineers, that affiliated to the SFA because its founders were Scots. We know too the game came to Beijing, albeit perhaps forty years later, but by about 1918. Proof of that too in ours because in the National Galleries of Scotland on loan from George Watson's College is a photograph not, as it states of a football team in the city's Beihai Park, but two, a match, an encounter, perhaps a regular fixture. Now with George Watson's involved the temptation is to say it is of rugby not soccer. But count the players. There are twenty-two. And four non-players too, one who looks as if he might be the referee. And look more closely still. One eleven to the right is European. And the other to the left is mostly not; nine Chinese and two non-. On that basis alone it is clear that as Europe staggered out of The Great War, since the park was closed to the public until 1925, high-ranking, native Beijing-ites at least taken to the game.  

And there is perhaps more evidence of the same from 5,000 miles away in the USA, from the capital of Minnesota, Minneapolis. In 1913 Wen Ping Pan, aged nineteen, had been one of the first graduates from Beijing's Hsing Hua College, now one of China's top universities. He was therefore one of the then great and good. And he was also an athlete. He would win a Gold Medal at the Far Eastern Olympics in Manila in the Philippines that same year before the following year in 1914 arriving via Honolulu, with his brother, Wen Whay Pan, to further their studies at Minnesota University. In fact, although Whay would return to China, Ping did not. He married in America, settled in Minnesota and died there in 1981.

But the point to this preamble is that both Ping and Whay at Minnesota University are said to have played soccer and showed considerable talent at "dribbling and passing". Now that might have been because they were naturally good sportsmen and just took to it en place but there is the possibility they already knew what they were doing, and from "playing in Peking". However, there is more. The Pan-boys father is said possibly to have been Eurasian. Moreover he was a surgeon, practicing some Western medicine. qualifying in Beijing, working there in the 1890s but first transferring with his family to Shang'hai in about 1900 and then dying there in 1901. Ping would have been about seven years old. And then it all comes down to how long Pan stayed on the banks of the Huangpu River following his father's death. A prompt return to Beijing confirms football learned there. A delayed one opens up the possibility that it was in China's second city and therefore amongst its Scots.