Kokpar, Horse Racing and Steppe Games: Where Xinjiang’s Grasslands Compete
A Field Full of Horses and a Dead Goat
The first time I saw kokpar I did not know what I was looking at. I was on the edge of a grassland outside Narati in July, and a dust cloud had formed in the distance with maybe forty horsemen circling it. As I got closer I realized they were fighting, calmly and skillfully, over the carcass of a goat with its legs tied together. Nobody was angry. They were grinning. This, I learned, was kokpar, and it is the most Xinjiang thing I have ever watched.
Kokpar is a Central Asian team sport played on horseback with a headless goat carcass as the ball. Two teams of riders try to carry it to a goal at either end of a field, usually a circle or a pair of marked spots a few hundred meters apart. It looks chaotic. It is not. The riders train for years, and the horse matters as much as the man.
If your trip lands in summer, festival season is when you will see it. But kokpar is also played informally on any excuse: a wedding, a harvest, a visiting relative. Ask at a Kazakh yurt camp and someone will point you to the nearest field.
The first match I watched ran on a flat stretch about two kilometers past the last yurt at the end of a gravel side road. There was no sign, no ticket booth, no announcement. A few dozen cars and pickup trucks had simply parked in a ragged ring, their drivers leaning on the hoods, and the field between them was already churned to pale dust. I had driven past that same road an hour earlier and seen nothing at all. These games appear and vanish on a schedule known mostly to the people who live there, and the only reliable way to find one is to be on the ground and ask.
The Rules (Loose Ones)
A formal match uses a goat weighing 25 to 35 kilos, drained and frozen, then thawed on site. The corpse is the ball. Riders scoop it up at a gallop, tuck it under one leg, and sprint while opponents lean in to wrestle it free. There is no offside, no whistle every five seconds, and the referee mostly watches for genuine danger rather than fouls.
Scoring is simple: drop the goat in the opposing team’s scoring circle. A match runs two halves of around 20 minutes, with a halftime where the horses, not the players, get the water. I watched a final in the Ili region where the winning score was 7 to 5, and the speed at which a rider could pivot and sling a 30-kilo carcass was genuinely athletic.
A word on safety for spectators. Stay behind the rope or the parked vehicles. The horses are fast and the riders are focused on each other, not on you. I sat about fifteen meters back and a stray gallop still kicked dust into my lens.
The rulebook, such as it exists, changes from one county to the next. In some Ili valleys the goal is a simple hoop on a post, a painted tire fixed to a wooden frame, and the rider must drop the goat through it rather than into an open circle. In other places the scoring zone is a shallow ditch dug into the turf. None of this is written down for visitors. The organizer waves his arm toward the markers before the start, and that is the entire briefing. Learn it the way the locals do, by watching the first five minutes from the safety of your parked car.
Horse Racing, the Tamer Cousin
Where kokpar is a brawl, open grassland horse racing is pure speed. Races are short, usually 1,000 to 3,000 meters on a straight or a loop, with children as young as eight riding in the junior events. The Kazakh and Kyrgyz communities treat these races as serious business. A good racer costs more than a car.
The Bayinbuluke grassland and the Kalajun grasslands host some of the biggest summer meets, often tied to Nauryz in March or local harvest celebrations in August. Entry is free for spectators. Bring cash for the food stalls, which appear like magic around the track: grilled lamb, fresh naan, and sweet fried dough.
The junior races are the ones that will surprise you. An eight year old on a pony barely taller than a dining table leans low over the neck and wins by a length, and the crowd of a few hundred roars exactly as it would for the adults. I timed one children’s heat at just under ninety seconds for a 1,200 meter loop, and the small jockey was laughing the whole way. These are not carnival ponies. They are pasture bred, grass fed, and ridden from the age most kids get a bicycle. The prize for a junior win is often a embroidered cap or a bag of sweets, but the pride is the real trophy, and you can see it on the child’s face for the rest of the day.
Buzkashi, the Spectacular Variant
In the Kyrgyz and Tajik areas near the southern mountains, you may hear of buzkashi, the Afghan-origin cousin where the “ball” is a calf and the field is enormous. It is rarer and more intense than kokpar, and matches are long, sometimes an hour. I have not seen one in Xinjiang myself, but travelers heading toward Tashkurgan sometimes catch a winter game. Treat it as a bonus, not a plan.
Where kokpar uses a headless goat, buzkashi uses a calf carcass that can weigh sixty kilos or more, and the objective is to scoop it, carry it in a circuit around a marker, and drop it in a scoring area often at the far end of a field that stretches a full kilometer. The riders use longer whips, and the pace is more punishing because the prize circle is so far away. If you ever get the chance, go, but do not build a two week itinerary around a game that may not happen. Ask at guesthouses in the Pamir towns in January or February, when the deep cold and the holiday season make a match most likely, and bring serious cold weather gear because those fields sit above 3,000 meters.
Other Steppe Games Worth a Look
Kokpar is the headline, but the grasslands have a whole calendar of horse games. There is kyz kuu, a flirtatious chase where a young woman rides ahead and a man gives chase; if he catches her she whips him, and if he does not she gets teased. There is tug-of-war on horseback, and there is bareback racing for the kids. None of these are in any guidebook app. You find them by being on a grassland in summer and asking.
How to Time Your Visit
The reliable window for kokpar and racing is June through August, when the pastures are green and the communities gather. March Nauryz brings games in the north. Winter games happen but are weather-dependent and harder to plan around a self-drive route. If you want a specific event, call a Ili valley guesthouse a week ahead; they will know what is happening that weekend.
The sweet spot, in my experience, is the last two weeks of July. The grass is at its tallest, the school holidays mean more young riders are free to compete, and the weather along the northern grasslands holds steady in the low twenties Celsius during the day. August gets busier with domestic tourists, and by early September the yurt camps start dismantling for the season. If you want a quieter field with more room to stand and film, aim for a weekday match rather than a Saturday one. Sundays are the most common day for informal games because that is when families gather anyway, and a Sunday match near a yurt camp is where you are most likely to be pulled in to dance afterward.
Photography and Respect
These are real competitions, not performances staged for tourists, even when tourists are welcome. Ask before putting a long lens in someone’s face, and tip the organizers if you set up a tripod in their field. A 20-yuan note handed to the guy with the whistle goes a long way. The Sayram Lake region and the wider Kalajun grasslands are reliable summer spots, but the smaller the gathering, the warmer the welcome.
Bring a lens with real reach, a 200mm or longer, because you will not be allowed inside the ring and the action happens thirty or forty meters out. A polarizer helps cut the glare off the pale dust. Charge two batteries; a summer match under a white sky drains them fast, and there is no wall socket on a pasture. Most important, shoot the people as much as the horses. The old man in a worn cap who has come to watch his grandson ride is the real story, and he will usually smile if you lower the camera and say a word or two first. Post the photos if you like, but a copy shown back on your phone screen is worth more than any tip.
Why It Matters
Xinjiang is sold to foreign travelers as scenery. The scenery is real. But the steppe games are where the culture actually breathes. A kokpar match taught me more about the place in an afternoon than three museums. If your route crosses the northern grasslands in summer, leave a day open and follow the dust cloud. You will not regret it.
A Self-Drive Loop Through the Game Country
The games are scattered, and a car is the only practical way to chase them. From Urumqi, take the G30 expressway west toward Yining, a drive of roughly 680 kilometers that most people split over a day with a night in the dry scrub around the Jinghe junction. From Yining the roads fan out into the pasture counties: north to Narati about 250 kilometers, west to the Sayram Lake ring road at 150 kilometers, and south into the Kalajun and Tekes river valleys within 120 to 180 kilometers. Fuel is cheap and plentiful; a liter of 92 octane gasoline runs around 7.5 yuan, and the tank of a typical rental SUV costs about 350 yuan to fill. Keep the tank above half, because the last stretches to a yurt camp are often unpaved and the nearest pump can be sixty kilometers behind you.
I built my own loop over nine days. Day one from Urumqi to Yining with a stop at the Sayram Lake north shore. Days two and three around Narati and the smaller pastures east of it, asking at each camp about weekend games. Day four a long drive south to Tekes and the Kalajun boardwalks, where I caught a children’s race on a Tuesday afternoon. Day five back north toward the Ili valley floor, where a wedding and a kokpar match shared the same field. The point of the loop is not the distance. It is that you move slowly enough to be present when a game starts, and a car lets you wait it out instead of chasing the last bus home.
The Horses and the Men Who Ride Them
You cannot understand kokpar without understanding the horse. The animals are not the tall thoroughbreds of a city track. They are small, dense, sure footed mountain and steppe breeds, often under 150 centimeters at the shoulder, bred to turn on a hoof and carry a grown man at a gallop for a full hour. A decent racehorse from a good Ili pasture line can sell for 30,000 to 80,000 yuan, and the very best have changed hands for more than a new car. The rider’s bond with the animal is the whole sport. Boys start on ponies at six or seven, and by their teens they can hang off the side of a running horse to grab the goat without losing stride.
Spend a few minutes before a match watching the warm up. The riders walk the horses in tight circles, slap their necks, and talk to them in low voices. When the goat is thrown in, the horse already knows the job. That partnership is why a visiting rider cannot simply rent a horse and join in. You can watch, you can cheer, and if you are lucky a family will lift a child up behind you for a slow lap around the ring. That slow lap, at walking pace with a grinning ten year old, told me more about the place than the match itself, and it cost the family nothing but a smile.
What to Budget and What to Pack
The games themselves cost nothing to watch. You will spend your money getting there and feeding yourself while you wait. Budget about 200 to 400 yuan a day for a rental car including fuel and the occasional toll, 150 to 300 yuan a night for a yurt or a guesthouse bed, and maybe 40 yuan for a plate of grilled lamb and a round of naan at the track. Pack a wide brim hat and sunglasses; the grassland sun at 1,500 to 2,000 meters of altitude is stronger than it looks. Pack a windbreaker even in July, because the temperature drops fast after the sun goes behind the ridgeline. Pack cash in small bills, because the food stalls and the occasional entrance to a fenced field run on notes, not cards or phones. And pack patience. The match that was supposed to start at four in the afternoon often starts at five, because the horses need to arrive and the organizer needs his tea.
One more thing worth packing: a basic phrasebook or a translation app that works offline. Signal on the open pastures is patchy, and the difference between catching a game and missing it is often whether you could ask a stranger where the field is. Learn two words, the name of the game and the word for today, and point at the horizon. Someone will laugh, then point you down the right road, and that is how most of my best afternoons in Xinjiang began.