Former Site of Puppet Manchukuo Xinjing Racecourse

At the intersection of Xingyang Street and Chuncao Road, a hundred-meter stretch of dark brown ceramic tile and concrete rises at a steep forty-five-degree angle. This weathered grandstand is the sole survivor of the Xinjing National Racecourse, completed on September 5, 1935. During the puppet state era, this structure anchored a massive entertainment complex designed to extract wealth from the local population through state-sanctioned gambling.

Twice a year, in spring and autumn, tens of thousands of spectators climbed these concrete exterior stairs. They paid a fifty-cent admission fee to crowd onto wooden benches beneath a massive steel-framed rain canopy. For twelve races daily, the air filled with the scent of horse sweat and the roar of the crowd. Bettors clutched five-yuan betting tickets or one-yuan lottery stubs, watching horses parade for thirty minutes before the start. The races took two forms: high-speed carriage races and riding races, which included both flat speed runs and obstacle courses.

The track operated under a rigid colonial hierarchy. Four-fifths of the riders were Japanese. Chinese and Korean riders occupied the lower tiers. An apprentice rider could not even set foot on the track during a race. To rise to the prestigious rank of "knight," non-Japanese riders had to pass rigorous horsemanship exams and demonstrate fluency in standard Tokyo-dialect Japanese. Above them, elite trainers managed stables of sixty horses, receiving ninety yuan per horse monthly from the Horse Administration Bureau—a sum equal to three months of a standard clerk's salary.

The spectacle ended abruptly with the Japanese surrender in August 1945. In 1950, workers stripped the grandstand of its wooden benches, carting them away to furnish the open-air music hall in Changchun Children's Park. In 1958, a fifty-four-meter concrete parachute tower rose nearby, only to be demolished decades later as residential blocks closed in. Today, the grandstand stands silent, its sauce-colored tiles chipped and its steel canopy gone.