History
| Happy Valley Racecourse | |||||||||||||||||
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| Westerly panorama of Happy Valley Racecourse | |||||||||||||||||
| Happy Valley Racecourse at night | |||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 快活谷馬場 | ||||||||||||||||
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| Alternative Chinese name | |||||||||||||||||
| Traditional Chinese | 跑馬地馬場 | ||||||||||||||||
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It was first built in 1845 to provide horse racing for the British people in Hong Kong. Before it was built, the area was a swampland, but also the only flat ground suitable for horse racing on Hong Kong Island. To make way for the racecourse, Hong Kong Government prohibited rice growing by villages in the surrounding area. The first race ran in December 1846. Over the years, horse racing became more and more popular among the Chinese residents.
On 26 February 1918, there was a fire and at least 590 people died. By the next day as many as 576 definite deaths were reported by the Hong Kong Telegraph. It was caused by the collapse of a temporary grandstand, which knocked over food stalls and set bamboo matting ablaze. It is a fire with one of the highest casualties in Hong Kong history.
The race track was rebuilt in 1995, and became a world-class horse racing facility.
Read more about this topic: Happy Valley Racecourse
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“A poet’s object is not to tell what actually happened but what could or would happen either probably or inevitably.... For this reason poetry is something more scientific and serious than history, because poetry tends to give general truths while history gives particular facts.”
—Aristotle (384–323 B.C.)
“The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the history of theirs?”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”
—Willa Cather (1876–1947)