A champion pigeon in a 2018 auction in Beijing fetching 22 million RMB.Ĭhina has a long history of breeding pigeons, initially for food during the Zhou dynasty (1046 – 256 BCE), and later as couriers for letters and military correspondence in the Sui (581 – 618) and Tang (618 – 907) dynasties.
A single race can generate a pool of billions of RMB in prize money, and a prizewinning pigeon can sell for millions. According to Chinese Racing Pigeon, a bi-monthly magazine published by the Chinese Racing Pigeon Association (CRPA), the prize money of all pigeon races in China in 2015 alone totaled over 28.1 billion RMB. Over the last century, pigeon racing has transformed from a simple hobby into a business worth billions of RMB, opening the door to corruption and organized crime. “The joy of keeping racing pigeons lies in their instinctive homing ability even when they’re transported hundreds of kilometers away.”īut it’s becoming an increasingly pricey sport to pursue. “To race is the only meaning of raising these pigeons,” Jin Bing (pseudonym), another Beijing pigeon racer in his 50s, declares to TWOC. When TWOC spoke to Hou at 4:30 p.m., over 100 birds had already returned home, with the fastest arriving at 3:08 p.m.-having taken exactly nine hours to complete the trip at an average speed of 71.3 kilometers per hour. the following day to fly back to their respective homes in Beijing.Īs soon as each racing pigeon lands on the electronic pad at the door of its home, a chip embedded in its foot ring automatically sends its time of arrival and its owner’s address to the race organizer, down to the exact millisecond. There, the bird and 1,181 of its fellow racers were loaded into nine-layered metal cages on a truck and transported to a parking lot in Zhoukou, Henan province, where they were released at precisely 6:08 a.m. The previous morning, the 60-year-old Beijing resident had brought the 2-year-old bird to the Guang’an Gymnasium as his sole entry to the Beijing Xicheng District Racing Pigeon Association (BXDRPA). Winning blood with multiple performance, excelling at distances 500 -800 km and in large birdage,įamilies that come from current winning stock and continue to produce winners at all levels of competion world wide.Since the early afternoon, Hou Yong (pseudonym) has been watching the sky for the return of one of his 50 racing pigeons as it finds its way home from nearly 700 kilometers away in a pigeon race on April 29.
It was decided just prior to the PMV outbreak in Melbourne to once again to heavily involve ourselves with importation of racing pigeons from Europe due to not being able to source stock birds that which I was after locally, extensive research was then carried out carried out with a number factors weighing heavily in the decision making process Pigeons offered for sale include Koopmans ,Heremans (Cuesters) Van Den Bulcks, Laenens "Pitbull "lines and last but not least the most exciting Patrick Boeckx pigeonsįor the last 34 years we have successfully been involved in pigeon racing in Melbourne in both the Victorian Homing Association and the Greater Melbourne Pigeon Federation having won Federation Averages in both. Now having retired and moved to Northern Tasmania were we will still be racing pigeons but on a much reduced scale we will be able to offer young stock birds from our collection of imports we have aquired in recent years.