The Hong Kong Jockey Club closed its 2025/26 racing season with HK$143.3 billion in wagering turnover, up 3.2%, and 401,259 visits from mainland Chinese and overseas tourists.
Tourist visits were approximately double the previous season’s level. Less than four months from now, the Club will begin the next phase of that strategy at Conghua Racecourse in Guangzhou.
Regular racing at Conghua is scheduled to begin on October 31, 2026. It will be the first regular programme of international-standard thoroughbred racing staged in mainland China since Guangzhou stopped horse racing in 1999.
But one distinction is essential:
There will be no betting at Conghua.
Racing without wagering
Horse racing itself is not prohibited in mainland China. Commercial gambling is.
Conghua’s meetings will therefore operate as sporting and tourism events, with races conducted according to the Hong Kong Jockey Club’s professional rules but without bets being accepted at the venue.
Guangzhou authorities explicitly describe them as demonstration events with no betting permitted. The same model was used for Conghua’s exhibition meeting in 2019, which followed the HKJC’s racing rules and conditions with one fundamental exception: no wagering.
This means Conghua is not a mainland extension of the Club’s legal betting monopoly in Hong Kong.
It is an extension of the product surrounding the betting business: the horses, races, sporting standards, hospitality, entertainment, training infrastructure and brand.
Why tourism matters
The HKJC has spent heavily on turning Sha Tin and Happy Valley into broader entertainment destinations rather than venues designed only for existing bettors.
Its investments include hospitality areas, digital experiences and visitor services aimed at tourists and younger audiences. The Club has also worked with travel-industry partners to include racing within Hong Kong tourism itineraries.
The rise to more than 400,000 tourist visits suggests that the approach is gaining traction.
Those visitors may attend for the racing, atmosphere, food or live entertainment. Some may wager while in Hong Kong, where the activity is legal and regulated. But the tourism product does not depend entirely on converting every visitor into a bettor.
Conghua pushes that distinction even further.
The new venue must attract an audience despite removing wagering from the on-site experience altogether.
Conghua will test whether the HKJC’s racing product is strong enough to travel without its betting product.
Two cities, three racecourses
The Club describes its strategy as a triangle connecting:
Happy Valley;
Sha Tin;
Conghua.
Conghua has operated as the HKJC’s mainland training base since 2018. Its facilities include four tracks, 12 stable blocks, a veterinary hospital and capacity for more than 1,100 horses. A new grandstand will accommodate approximately 8,000 to 9,500 spectators, depending on the configuration cited by the Club and Guangzhou authorities.
The initial calendar is expected to contain relatively few meetings. Around those races, the Club plans dining, retail, online experiences and other equine-related activities.
The stated objective is to support tourism, professional training, veterinary development and the wider equine industry across the Greater Bay Area.
That makes Conghua partly a racecourse and partly a demonstration platform.
It can showcase Hong Kong racing standards to mainland audiences, provide a destination for visitors and strengthen the supporting economy around horses — without opening a conventional gambling market.
The real commercial question
Conghua will not directly reproduce the economics of Sha Tin or Happy Valley because spectators will not be able to bet there.
Its value will instead depend on different measures:
attendance;
tourism spending;
hospitality and event revenue;
repeat visitation;
commercial partnerships;
growth in equine services and employment;
whether mainland exposure ultimately increases interest in Hong Kong racing.
The Club can benefit indirectly if visitors who discover the sport in Conghua later attend meetings in Hong Kong, engage with its digital content or strengthen the international profile of its racing brand.
But that outcome is not automatic.
A racecourse without wagering must compete as entertainment. The races, facilities and visitor experience have to justify the journey on their own.
The 2025/26 season demonstrated that Hong Kong racing can attract a growing tourist audience.
Conghua will test something more difficult: whether that audience can be expanded across the border while keeping sport and wagering legally separate.
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Web: eastasiareports.com · Email: [email protected] · LinkedIn: East Asia Reports · Author: Adrià Mas