Polo Legend and History

"Let other people play at other things the King of Games is still the Game of Kings" This verse is inscribed on a stone tablet next to a polo ground in Skardu, near the fabled silk route from China to the West. In one ancient sentence, it epitomises the feelings of many polo players today.
Polo (also known as Cho-gan) is a team game played on a field with one goal for each team. A polo game may be played in an enclosed arena or on an open grass field. In the modern form of the sport, there are three players to a side in a closed-arena game and six in the full-sized field variant.
Polo features successive periods called "chukkas" (chukkars in Pakistan), and riders score by driving a ball into the opposing team's goal using a long-handled stick or mallet. In this it is similar to many team sports such as football and field hockey. The main difference is that the players play on horseback.
ORIGINS OF POLO Polo is an equestrian sport with its origins embedded in Central Asia dating back to 6th century BC. At first it was a training game for cavalry units for the King's guards or other elite troops. To the warlike tribesmen of the steppe who played polo with as many as 100 players to a side, it was a miniature battle.
Polo was probably developed first in Skardu, Kadakh, Kargil and in a few places of Tibet and Nepal. The earliest evidence of polo is found in a 4000-4500 year-old Balti story named 'Hilafoo Kaisaar'. However, many scholars believe that polo originated among the Iranian tribes sometime before Darius I (521485 BC) and his cavalry extended the Achaemenid rule to greater Persia. Certainly Persian literature and art give us the richest accounts of polo in antiquity.
Wherever its precise origins, polo seems to have spread throughout the Iranian plateau, Asia Minor, China and the Indian subcontinent along with the use of light cavalry.
Some people erroneously believe that the strongly equestrian Mongol hordes invented polo. However, the Mongol Empire and the rise of the Golden Horde occurred almost a full millennium after polo had been well-established in Asia and the Iranian plateau. Still, the Mongols did play a variant of polo with the head of a goat instead of a ball.
Polo was also popular in China, where it was the royal pastime for many centuries. The Chinese probably learned the game from the Iranian nobles who sought refuge in Chinese courts after the invasion of the Iranian Empire by the Arabs.
Alternatively, Indian tribes (who had been taught by the Iranians) may have taught the Chinese. The polo stick appears on Chinese royal coats of arms, and the game was part of the court life in the golden age of Chinese classical culture under Minghuang, the Radiant Emperor, who was an enthusiastic equestrian.
Before modern times, no variant of polo ever appeared in the European peninsula, probably because Europe's military forces depended on heavy armoured cavalry, as opposed to the light, highly mobile cavalry of that Asian armies had employed since at least Alexander's time.
Throughout Asian antiquity, from Japan to Egypt, from India to the Byzantine Empire, Polo and its variants were the nearest equivalents to a "national sport." However, as the great Eastern empires decayed and collapsed in the Middle Ages following their decimation by the Mongol hordes, so too disappeared the glittering court life of which polo was so important a part, and the game itself was preserved only in remote villages. The sport was introduced in South Asia, by the Muslim conquerors in the 13th century. English word Polo is in fact a Balti word meaning ball.
Gilgit, Chitral and Skardu have always played the game of polo closest to its original form. In the past, local Rajas, Mirs and Mehtars were the patrons of the game. At times, more than 50% of the annual budget of their principalities was spent on supporting the game.
POLO LEGENDS There is an interesting legend attached to polo in northern Pakistan, dating perhaps from the days before history was recorded.
It appears that a king begged the gods to give him back his missing wife. The gods, in return, made it a condition that the king must sacrifice his two sons. They gave him a fast horse - it 'brought mountains together and split the valleys' in the tale - and sent him to a lost valley in Baltistan, some two hundred miles from Shandur.
There, so the story continues, he arrive with the heads of his sons, and had the task of hitting them both, at fast gallop, with his polo stick into an opening in the mountains. If he succeeded, he would regain his missing queen. Interestingly, there is a real polo field beyond a very small opening in a mountain in Baltistan, near Kaphulu, which corresponds to that in the legend.
Ferdowsi, the famed Iranian poet-historian, gives a number of accounts of royal polo tournaments in his 9th century epic, Shahnameh (the Epic of Kings). In the earliest account, Ferdowsi romanticises an international match between Turanian force and the followers of Siyavash, a legendary Persian prince from the earliest centuries of the Empire.
The poet is eloquent in his praise of Siyavash's skills on the polo field. Ferdowsi also tells of Emperor Shapur II of the Sassanid dynasty of the 4th century, who learned to play polo when he was only seven years old.