Did ancient China have racing competitions like ancient Rome?

Vehicle manufacturing during the Spring and Autumn period and the Warring States period was already quite advanced, and car racing between drivers became an important form of sport. Of course, horse racing was also quite popular during the same period. Most people know the story of Tian Ji's horse race. The skill of driving a chariot was extremely important to the car soldiers, in addition to the custom of competing in the imperial skill among the scholars, the exam school car soldiers also need this competitive form of driving skill competition.

But after the Qin Dynasty, the custom of racing gradually disappeared, to be precise, it was the middle and late Warring States period has begun to die out, mainly because of the withdrawal of the car soldiers and the rise of the cavalry. So horse racing has been passed down to the present day with the continuation of cavalry in the hot-weapon era after the end of the cold-weapon era, while traditional racing has long since disappeared in China.

But more humorously, it seems that there has always been a tradition of racing abroad, because until the invention of the automobile, horse-drawn carriages were the prevalent means of transportation in Europe, so classical racing has always been prevalent in Europe, and after the invention of the automobile, the Europeans almost the first time they thought of using the car like a horse-drawn carriages for racing, and this gave rise to the first modern racing in Europe in 1887.

The disappearance of horse-drawn carriages as a practical means of transportation in China is also rather funny - because we invented something called the sedan chair, which is still based on the car, because in ancient times, for the extremely honored and prominent figures, the people would lift his car up and walk around in its entirety, and this kind of lightening, removing the wheels, and adding a canopy made it possible for the carriages to be used for racing. Wheels, plus the canopy becomes a sedan chair. Of course, the sedan chair was also popular in Europe for a while (of course, only limited to the nobility), because before the invention of the leaf spring suspension, the horse carriage is much more difficult to bump than the sedan chair, but the invention of the 17th century leaf spring suspension to save this ancient means of transportation, which let the European nobles also back to the carriage. However, China did not invent the leaf spring, and the habit of sitting in a sedan chair and riding a horse is even institutionalized, the use of horse-drawn carriages is also greatly reduced, only the slowed down version of the horse-drawn carriages - oxcarts, farmers have been used. The problem is that oxcart racing is really not feasible.

So the use of horse-drawn carriages was far less widespread than in Europe during the long imperial era of China. That's why most of the large horse and carriage burial pits excavated today date from before the Han Dynasty.

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For more on cars in pre-Qin China, watch the documentary "Resurrecting the Legion," which partly talks about the Qin's standard of car building.