ABSTRACT
Chinese historians designate the term “late Qing” for the last decades of imperial China between 1841 and 1911. Focusing on the diffusion of modern sports in the late Qing period, this chapter reviews the history of the cross-cultural sporting encounters between China and the West with particular attention to the ways in which Westerners enjoyed modern sports in (semi-colonial) China, and how the Chinese encountered modern sports overseas prior to 1911. Taking the lead in modernising Chinese society and promoting Western technology, military-related physical training offered Chinese youth opportunities for playing modern sports and “self-strengthening” their bodies. The presence of those “popular-in-teenagers sports” in China did not pertain to military schools, but rather the proliferation of Christian education and youth organisations such as the YMCA. Parallel to the evolution of physical education in the name of modernisation, the early history of Western sports in China was defined by the presence of Anglo-Americans in treaty-port cities.
