2026 is a Horse Year in the Chinese zodiac, and every equestrian club in the country has built a campaign around it. That is the noise. Underneath it sits a real market: roughly 2,600 riding clubs, an import channel for live horses that most foreign suppliers have never understood, and a saddle and apparel segment where European brands still hold the top shelf. If you sell saddles, riding gear or sport horses, or you run a club, this article is about what moves money in China, not about the romance of it.
Written by Olivier Verot, founder of Gentlemen Marketing Agency, based in Shanghai since 2012. I have worked with European saddlers, riding apparel makers and sport horse breeders on their China entry, and I have spent enough afternoons in club offices in Shanghai, Chengdu and Guangzhou to know who signs the cheque.
The numbers, and what they hide
Chinese equestrian went from 907 clubs in 2016 to 2,585 clubs at the end of 2023, with an industry size around 20.99 billion yuan, according to Zhiyan Consulting. That growth curve is real. What it hides is that the average club is small, urban, and lives off children’s lessons, not off competition riders.
The state pushed this. The Ministry of Agriculture and the General Administration of Sport published a National Horse Industry Development Plan in 2020, the first document of its kind, which treated horses as both agriculture and sport. Provinces followed with land, subsidies and event budgets. That is why clubs opened faster than riders appeared.
History: the horse in Chinese culture
Equestrian tradition in China goes back several millennia. Chariot driving was one of the six arts young nobles had to master under the Zhou Dynasty (1122-256 BC). Polo was practised during the Tang Dynasty, with roots traceable to Central Asia. Sculptures and dated paintings of polo players and mounted warriors survive, and the terracotta army of Xi’an includes riders and a war chariot in its ranks.
But for centuries the horse was associated with the Mongolian steppes and Tibetan festivals more than with the Han heartland. Horses were work animals, or meat. The Mongol invasions did not turn the animal into a symbol of national strength, even though it is one of the twelve zodiac signs. Local breeds are registered today: rustic ponies like the Sichuan Jianchang and the Xinjiang Bailikun, and old draft horses whose morphology changed through crossbreeding from the 1950s, like the Heihe. None of them are adult sport horses. That single fact explains most of the import economics below.
The 2008 Olympics, with the equestrian events held in Hong Kong, restarted public interest. Alex Hua Tian was the face of it. He is no longer alone: China sent a full eventing team to the Tokyo Olympic Games, and at the 2023 Hangzhou Asian Games the Chinese eventers took both team and individual gold, the country’s first equestrian golds since the sport entered the Asian Games in 1982. For a marketer, that matters because it gives Chinese parents a domestic reference point. The sport is no longer purely foreign.
How the market is really structured
Foreign suppliers arrive assuming one market. There are at least four, and they buy completely different things. Get this wrong and you send a catalogue of competition saddles to a club whose oldest client is nine years old.
| Segment | What it looks like | Typical spend (2025-2026) | What they buy from you |
|---|---|---|---|
| Mall and city pony clubs | Indoor arena in or next to a shopping centre, ponies, 30 to 45 minute sessions, heavy child traffic | 500 to 800 yuan per 45-minute lesson | Helmets, body protectors, small boots, pony tack, branding |
| Suburban riding schools | 10 to 40 horses, outdoor arena, weekend families, some adult beginners | Annual membership from around 12,000 yuan, packages 20,000 to 60,000 yuan | School saddles, bridles, rider apparel, arena footing, fencing |
| Owner liveries and competition barns | Clients own their horse, board it, compete in national or CSI classes | Board plus training often above 100,000 yuan a year | Custom saddles, high-end bridlework, rugs, veterinary and farrier supply |
| Tourism and grassland riding | Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang, Qinghai, seasonal, local horses | Low ticket per ride, high volume in summer | Volume tack, safety gear, ranch equipment |
The mall club format is the one that changed the market. It puts a pony in a place where a mother already spends her Saturday. No boots, no smell, no drive to the suburbs. It lowers the entry barrier to a level a first-time family accepts. It also means the first purchase a Chinese family makes in your category is a helmet, not a saddle.
The parents pay, so write for the parents
Young riders make up close to half of all participants and around 70% of the consumer base, according to CBNData. The rider is a child. The buyer is a parent, usually the mother, usually with one child, usually choosing between riding, piano, swimming and ice skating.
That parent is not buying a sport. She is buying three things: safety, discipline, and a photograph. Safety is why helmets and body protectors sell before anything else, and why a CE or SEI certification printed clearly on the box closes a sale. Discipline is the argument the club uses in its sales pitch: posture, courage, responsibility for a living animal. The photograph is the part foreign brands underestimate. A child in a clean jacket on a good-looking horse is social content, and social content is part of what the family paid for.
Practical consequences. Your product photography should feature children with a visible face and a parent nearby, not an anonymous adult jumping 1.40m. Your sizing chart needs child sizes in Chinese conventions, height in centimetres, not UK numbers. Your safety claim goes in the first line, not the fifth. And your apparel needs to survive being photographed, which means it needs to look good standing still.
The colour question from the old European catalogue is still live. Hunter tradition favours white or beige breeches with black, navy or bottle green jackets. In China red carries success, green carries a specific and unwelcome meaning for a man, and white with black reads as funeral. Nobody will tell you this in a meeting. They will just order the navy and leave the green in the sample box. If you sell children’s riding apparel, the same logic that applies to the broader children’s ready-to-wear market applies to you.
Importing live horses: the constraint nobody prices in
Because local breeds are too small for adult riding, Chinese centres import. Warmbloods for jumping and dressage, Quarter Horses for western riding, Criollos for polo, Akhal-Tekes for prestige, plus draft breeds brought in for breeding programmes aimed at producing a Chinese sport horse. That part of the old story has not changed.
What surprises exporters is the regulatory weight. China does not open live horse imports by default. Each origin country needs a bilateral quarantine and health protocol negotiated with the General Administration of Customs, and only countries holding such a protocol can ship. That list is short and it moves. If you are a breeder in a country without one, the answer is not “difficult”, it is “no”, and no amount of client demand changes it in a season.
For countries that do have a protocol, the standard path is 30 days of pre-export isolation in an approved facility in the origin country, a fixed battery of blood tests before and during that period, then a second isolation period on arrival in an approved quarantine station in China. Sixty days of stabling, testing, paperwork and air freight, before the horse ever sees the buyer’s arena. Add insurance and the risk of a single positive test grounding a whole consignment. A horse that leaves Europe at 30,000 euros does not arrive at 30,000 euros.
Competition horses take a different route. For international events in Shanghai, the venue is set up as a temporary disease-free zone recognised by the exporting authorities, so that horses can come in, compete, and go home without being trapped by the standard import rules. Shanghai Customs runs a dedicated clearance channel for the event. That mechanism exists for events, not for sales. Do not assume a horse that flew in for a show can simply stay.
So if you are a breeder, your realistic entry is not one horse to one owner. It is a supply agreement with a club that already knows the import path, or a partnership with one of the few Chinese importers running this route regularly. And if you sell equipment rather than horses, the import friction works for you: tack and apparel clear customs like any other goods, and demand grows with every horse that lands.
Imported equipment and where to sit on price
Equestrian in China is still a status purchase, and the buyer treats brand origin as a quality proxy. French, German, British and Italian saddlery sit at the top and are expected to be expensive. That is a comfortable place to be, on one condition: you have to justify the price with something the buyer can see or feel, not with heritage copy alone. Leather grade, tree fitting, a fitter who actually visits the barn. A Chinese client who spends 40,000 yuan on a saddle expects a service, and a saddle fitting visit is the single most effective sales tool I have seen in this category.
Below that, domestic manufacturers have closed most of the gap on schooling tack, stable equipment and basic apparel. Fighting them on price is a losing move. The winning position is either technical, with a certification and a measurable claim, or clearly aspirational, in which case the rules are the same as for any designer brand launching in China. What does not work is the middle: a foreign brand with foreign prices and no story.
Distribution reality: clubs are the gatekeepers. Most families buy what the coach recommends. A Tmall store with no club relationships will sell helmets and nothing else. A brand with twenty club partnerships and a coach programme will sell saddles. Build the offline relationship first, then let e-commerce collect the demand it creates. The pattern is the same one I described for sportswear brands entering China.
Big events are back, and they are working
The pandemic years emptied the calendar. The calendar has refilled. The Shanghai Longines Global Champions Tour ran on 1 to 3 May 2026 at the Shanghai Jiushi International Equestrian Center, its third consecutive year at that venue, drawing about 23,000 spectators over three days with ticket sales up roughly 10% year on year, as reported by China News Service. Around 45% of the audience came from outside Shanghai and 11% from abroad.
Guangzhou built its own version. The 2026 Guangzhou Equestrian Week opened in March with an FEI two-star competition, roughly 350 horse and rider combinations, and a 10,000 square metre expo with more than fifty exhibitors covering equipment, apparel and equestrian travel. That expo format is the cheapest serious entry point I know for a foreign brand: you meet club owners, coaches and importers in three days, which would otherwise take you six months of travel.
Read these events as media, not as sales channels. Almost nobody buys a saddle at a show. But the content produced there feeds a year of social posting, and a photo of your stand next to a five-star class is what convinces a club owner in Chengdu to answer your message. The same logic applies across premium sport in China, and it is exactly how brands use the motorsport calendar in China and the golf circuit.
Grassland riding is a different business
Do not confuse the urban club market with horse tourism in Inner Mongolia, Xinjiang and Qinghai. Different customers, different products, different margins. Xinjiang alone held about 1.13 million horses in 2023, more than 30% of the national herd, and counts over 30,000 horse-related businesses, with more than 2,000 new ones registered in 2025, up 17.58% year on year, according to China’s agricultural information service. In Zhaosu county, horse industry output passed 1.2 billion yuan in 2024. The Yili International Horse Culture Tourism Festival has run more than thirty editions.
This segment buys volume, not luxury. Trail saddles that survive daily use, helmets for tourists who have never ridden, fencing, feed equipment, insurance. If you make ranch and trekking gear rather than competition tack, this is your market and your competition is Chinese manufacturing. If you make high-end sport equipment, this segment is a distraction. Choose one.
Xiaohongshu: the sport sells on the image
Xiaohongshu is where Chinese families decide whether riding is for them. Search 马术 on the app and you get club reviews, price breakdowns, outfit posts, first-lesson videos and long comparison notes written by mothers. That is the discovery layer. Baidu is where they check whether your brand is real. WeChat is where the club keeps them.
The mechanism matters. Xiaohongshu ranks a note on early engagement and on keyword match in the title and body, not on your follower count. A brand with 800 followers can outrank a brand with 80,000 if its notes answer the query people actually type. The queries here are specific: how much does a riding lesson cost, which helmet for a six-year-old, is riding safe for children, which club in Shanghai. Write notes that answer those, in Chinese, with real prices, and you get found. Post product beauty shots and you get nothing.
The second mechanism is KOC seeding. Not one big influencer, but thirty to fifty riding mothers and amateur riders with 2,000 to 30,000 followers each, given the product and left free to write. Their notes read as experience, which is the only register that converts in this category. Costs run a fraction of a KOL campaign, and the volume of notes is what makes your brand name look established when a parent searches it. Whether that beats a single celebrity deal is a question I answered in more detail in this piece on KOL marketing effectiveness in China.
Third, the generative search layer. Chinese users now ask DeepSeek, Doubao and Baidu’s AI answers questions like “which riding helmet brands are certified for children”. Those systems pull from indexed Chinese-language content: Xiaohongshu notes, Baidu Baike, Zhihu answers, trade media. If your brand has no Chinese-language footprint, it does not exist in those answers. Building that footprint is slow and cheap. Skipping it is free and expensive.
Case study: a Belgian saddle maker that stopped selling saddles first
Charlotte runs a family saddlery in Belgium, third generation, about 900 saddles a year, strong in Benelux and France. She came to us after eighteen months in China that produced 11 saddles sold and a Tmall store costing more than it earned. Her assumption was that Chinese riders would buy the same way European riders do: see the brand at a show, order the saddle.
What had failed: a Chinese distributor who listed the catalogue and did nothing else, a translated brochure that led with 1892 and family heritage, and paid Baidu ads sending traffic to a page nobody trusted because there were zero third-party mentions of the brand in Chinese anywhere online.
What we changed. We stopped pushing saddles and started with the coach. Chinese brand presence first: a Baidu Baike entry, forty Xiaohongshu notes seeded through riding mothers and two amateur competition riders, a WeChat account posting fitting advice instead of product. Then we funded a saddle fitter for six weeks of free fittings in eleven clubs across Shanghai, Hangzhou and Chengdu, on any saddle, including competitors’. Coaches got a technical session and a commission.
Why it worked: in China the coach is the prescriber, and trust is transferred, not claimed. A fitter who improves a horse’s back without selling anything creates an obligation the coach repays with recommendations. The Xiaohongshu notes then let the parent verify what the coach said. That is the step that closes the deal.
Result over the following fourteen months: 63 saddles sold, average order value up 22% because clients moved to the custom line, and six clubs buying school saddles in batches. Not a spectacular curve. A believable one, in a market with a few thousand serious buyers.
Horse as a symbol, and why brands outside the sport buy into it
The horse works as an imported status object, the same way a large car or a European wardrobe does. Chinese businesses understood this early and use horses in advertising to lend products an air of prestige and luxury. The subway poster below, shot in Shanghai, uses the Hollywood cowboy on green pasture to sell a premium milk product. Nothing about the product is equestrian. The image does the work.
For an equestrian brand, this is useful in one direction only. It means your visual language is already understood by Chinese consumers who have never ridden. It does not mean they will pay for your saddle. Symbol brings attention. The coach brings the sale.
FAQ
How many riding clubs are there in China and where are they?
Around 2,585 at the end of 2023, up from 907 in 2016. They cluster around wealthy urban areas: Beijing, Shanghai, the Pearl River Delta, Chengdu, Hangzhou. Guangdong alone accounts for several hundred, with Guangzhou well past 200. Club density follows household income and available suburban land, not riding tradition. A national distribution plan makes no sense here. Pick three cities and go deep.
Can I sell riding equipment in China without a Chinese company?
Yes. Cross-border e-commerce on Tmall Global or JD Worldwide lets you sell without a local entity, and equipment carries none of the restrictions live animals do. The catch is that cross-border makes club and coach relationships harder, since clubs want invoices and stock. Most brands start cross-border to test demand, then set up a local distributor or entity once volume justifies it.
How hard is it really to export live horses to China?
Hard, and binary. Your country either has a bilateral quarantine protocol with Chinese customs or it does not, and without one there is no workaround. With one, expect around 30 days of pre-export isolation plus a further quarantine period on arrival, repeated blood testing, air freight and insurance. Budget sixty days and a significant cost per head on top of the horse’s price. Work with an established importer rather than attempting it alone.
Which platform should an equestrian brand start with?
Xiaohongshu, because that is where parents research the sport and compare clubs and gear. Build twenty to forty Chinese-language notes answering real questions before you spend anything on ads. Add a Baidu presence so the brand looks verifiable, and a WeChat account to hold the relationship after first contact. Douyin works for club acquisition and event content but is weaker for considered equipment purchases.
Working with GMA
We are a Shanghai-based digital marketing agency and we have taken European sport and equipment brands into China since 2012, including saddlery, riding apparel and equestrian facilities.
For equestrian, our work is usually the same three blocks: Chinese-language visibility on Xiaohongshu and Baidu, KOC seeding with riding mothers and amateur riders, and introductions to clubs and coaches who act as prescribers.
If you sell saddles, gear, horses, or you run a club and want Chinese clients, talk to our team. First conversation is free and we will tell you if your product has a place here before we quote anything.
