Salon.com > Mandarin http://www.salon.com Wed, 19 Jun 2013 22:02:04 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 China goes long http://www.salon.com/2012/08/31/china_goes_long/ http://www.salon.com/2012/08/31/china_goes_long/#comments Fri, 31 Aug 2012 17:31:00 +0000 http://www.origin.railrode.net/?p=12997562 Sometime in mid-May this year, with the heat starting to intensify as the Shanghainese summer began to take hold, a little bit of history was made as a small but curious crowd of mostly high school students gathered to watch two teams play a sport none of them have ever seen played live before.

The Classical In Mandarin, it’s called gǎnlǎnqiú (literally, ‘olive ball’) but back in the West, it's better known as American football and what had just taken place on the grounds of the Shanghai High School was its team’s inaugural fixture.

A relatively error strewn game of flag football between the high school team and their teachers might not have been pleasing to the eye but it is symbolic of the growth of the sport within China. The school’s football programme is almost certainly the first of its kind in a Chinese-run school and only came about after students hassled a couple of American teachers into coaching them.

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