Beikou

Beikou Tarikebei, also called Daur hockey, means stick with curved root in the Daur language. While the sport has lots of similarities to field or street hockey, Beikou has been played for over a 1000 years. The Daur people are the descendants of the Khitan nomads (which founded the Liao Dynasty), and similar to the Mongols, were excellent at horse riding and archery, and also had a special affinity for wrestling and beikou. The Daurs are one of China’s smallest ethnic minorities with about 100,000 people, and are located in Inner Mongolia, China. They speak and read Mandarin, but also speak their own unwritten language. While the game is very popular with the Daur people, the rest of China does not play it, so Beikou gives the Daur people a sense of identity separate from the rest of the country. Children are trained early on, and some become valuable members of the Chinese national field hockey team. For adults, the game is mostly recreational and people will play it for any festival or celebration.

The game involves two teams using long sticks (about a meter long) or branches to hit a pulie ball back and forth to score a goal. The sticks are called tarikebei, and modern games use carved wooden sticks with a curve at the end that closely resembles a field hockey stick. Older versions of the sticks would have been made of branches that preferably had a curve to allow for better control. The pulie, which is about the size of baseball, can be made of different materials, but the most common is the knob of an apricot root, but it can also be a hand carved ball made of Mongolian Oak. When neither is readily available, a hairball made from cattle hair (or even wild animal hair) can be a quick substitute. There are even accounts that the ball could be made of bone.

When the game is played at night, the ball can is covered with felt and set on fire! Other fabric balls, which are soaked in flammable liquid (like pine-resin), are used since they last longer. Another way to create the Beikou fireball is to compact hardened white mushrooms into a sphere, but the center is left hallow, and then it is filled with the flammable pine resin. Interestingly enough, there is a rich history across the world of people playing with fire, whether it was the game pelota purepecha from Mesoamerica or Sepak Bola Api (Fireball) from Indonesia.

A Beikou game is two periods of roughly 15 minutes each. The team with the most points at the end of the game wins. Beikou is a recreational game, so the number of players, rule sets, and field size may differ depending on what is agreed upon before the game. The standard field length is about 50 meters, and the teams should have an equal number of players per team. In some renditions, the game is said to have a goal net at each end of the playing area. Most accounts mention that one simply needs to pass the ball over the opposing team’s back boundary line to score a point. Both versions have a goalie, which is the only player who can make contact with the ball with hands and feet.

The Molidawa Daur Cultural Association continues the practice of playing Beikou with the traditional clothing from long ago. Their traditional uniforms consist of “boots, silk pantaloons, long silk robes belted with a sash, and a Daur hat that looks a little like a bishop’s miter.” The game tends to be more physical than traditional field hockey, and since the game is played mostly for fun, games are filled with shouting and laughter. What you will not see is any of the players wearing protective gear when they play with the fireball. I wonder if this discourages the goalie from stopping the ball with their hands or feet?

Some believe the Daur term boikoo may have come from a Chinese game called bu da qui, which was popular during the Tang Dynasty (618-907 AD) of northern China. There were also similarities to another sport called Jiju, which was an ancient polo-like game. Bu da qui changed enough over time that a new name emerged, and this sport would be called beikou. It was primarily the Daur people who continued to play this game as it fell out of favor with the rest of the country. Another popular theory is that Daur boikoo could have originated from the Khitan hockey.

When the British version of field hockey came to China, the Daurs immediately became some of the best players in China due to the similarities with their own game. They had been playing for centuries, so it was no wonder they became so good so quick. Molidawa is where the best players of the area are sent for hockey development programs. The local Molidawa team has won five of the last 10 national championships, and the national team used to consist of only players from Molidawa. In the 2008 Olympics, five of the players, or almost a third of the team, come from Molidawa, with two of them from the same elementary school. Proportionally this is crazy since there are only 100,000 Daur people in a country of 1.4 billion! The Daur people represent only .00007 percent of the countries’ population, and they are a third of the national team! The Daur people are incredibly proud of their players who make it to international competition, as they represent their small part of China to the whole world.

Materials: 

·      A large play area (gym or outside)

·      A soft dodgeball

·      Hockey sticks

·      Cones, rubber disc dots, or long jump ropes to make the boundary lines

·      Hockey nets

o   Depends on which version you are going to play, but this material is not required

Prior Knowledge: The students should be studying Asia, with this focus Mongolia

Presentation

·      This is a floor hockey game from Mongolia. One of the features that make this game so unique is that they play this game at night. How do they do that? They light the ball on fire! This hockey game will feel like a combination of hockey and dodgeball to some degree.

·      If possible, use a soft dodgeball as the hockey puck. Choose a color that looks like fire (yellow, orange, red). I had one student suggest that we play in the dark with a glow in the dark ball, which did sound like a lot of fun.

·      The game will follow the general rules of hockey, but you will have to decide whether to use goals or a backline for a score. Both types of play can have their advantages or disadvantages. If you want higher scoring games and more students having the ability to score goals, use the back boundary line. This is also a good option if you do not have nets at your disposal. However, it will be so easy to score goals in this manner that goalies may become quickly frustrated. If you do have nets, and you have students who would like to be a goalie (like traditional hockey), it makes sense to use goal nets. However, the scoring will be harder because there is less space to score the ball through.

o   If you are using the boundary line as the goal, when you are playing this game in a gym, using the baselines of your court. If you are playing this game outside, cones or a jump rope could show the boundary. If you have a soccer field, the end lines make a natural boundary lines for the goals.

·      The highlight of this game is that if the ball touches a body part of a player, they are on fire, and they must stop everything and put themselves out. Each team has two water stations (cone, hula-hoop, etc.) on their side of the playing area that removes the fire so they can continue to play.

·      The students should try and hit the ball with their stick only, because if it touches them, they must run away from the action to “put themselves out.” When a player is on fire, they need to go to the water station back on their side.

o   The water station should be a hula-hoop that matches the color of the jersey of the team so it is easy for them to find it.

o   Having to run back to put yourself out makes it especially hard on the offense because they have to run all the way back to their side away from the action. Then they have to run back to the ball to re engage. This can be very tiring.

§  This action of leaving the ball when someone is on fire actually makes for much better hockey from your younger students because it prevents them from all grouping up around the ball. When they all congregate around the ball, it almost always touches someone’s foot, and they need to run away. As people run away from the group around the ball, it frees other players to more effectively move the ball around.

·      What I thought would be a fun gimmick to this game accidently created conditions for some of the best hockey play I have seen out of my younger players. It is important that they are honest when the ball touches them, and that they run away to “put themselves put.” Students tend to self-police this rule well, but other students will not hesitate telling someone if they are “on fire.”

·      Here is a diagram of the game setup:

Aims:

Direct:    For the students to learn about Mongolia by playing the sport of Beikou

Indirect:  

Listening to directions

Teamwork and team building

Communication

Strategy

Sportsmanship

Imagination

Physical skills practiced: 

Any skills associated with hockey will be present in this game, such as: moving, passing, and shooting a ball with a hockey stick. Students will also be running a lot.

Control Of Error: 

The instructor will need to help identify when a player touched the ball (especially on the foot when they might not feel it through the shoe). As I mentioned earlier, students will be more than willing to call this out as well.

Age: All ages with certain accommodations

Bibliography

 Beikou. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Beikou. Last edited July 19th, 2018. Last retrieved February 8th, 2022.

 Beikou / Boikoo Tarkbei. (2022). HockeyGods. https://hockeygods.com/hockeys/42-Beikou_Boikoo_Tarkbei Last retrieved February 8th, 2022.

 Deemer. A. Inner Mongolia’s Field Hockey Players. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2008/08/23/sports/olympics/0823-FIELDHOCKEY_index/s/0822-FIELDHOCKEY_slide1.html. Last retrieved February 8th, 2022.

 McGrath, C. (2008). A Chinese Hinterland, Fertile With Field Hockey. The New York Times. https://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/23/sports/olympics/23hockey.html. Last retrieved February 8th, 2022.

 Mr. Animate. (2021). How to Play Beikou. YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y_-5aYWGhlU. Last retrieved February 8th, 2022.

 Mongolian Beikou (Daur Hockey). (2020). Health and Fitness History. https://healthandfitnesshistory.com/ancient-sports/mongolian-beikou-daur-hockey/. Last accessed February 8th, 2022

Wood, R. (2016). About the Sport of Beikou or Daur Hockey. Topend Sports. https://www.topendsports.com/sport/list/hockey-daur.htm. Last accessed February 8th, 2022