The game the British took home from India in the 1860s and 1870s was already very old. Columbia University's archaeologists describe polo as a Central Asian invention more than 2,000 years old, known in Persian as chogān. Wikipedia notes that China, Iran, Manipur, Mongolia, Pakistan and Tibet all claim to be where it began. What can be dated with some confidence runs from the royal courts of Persia, Byzantium, Tang China and the Delhi Sultanate, through the Manipuri game of sagol kangjei and the clubs that British planters and officers founded in India, to Hurlingham in London, the plains of Argentina and the international game governed today.
How these pages handle disputed history
Polo history repeats a lot of stories that nobody has traced to a primary source. We follow three rules on every page in this section.
- Where sources disagree, we give each version and who says it. The founding years of the first clubs at Silchar and Calcutta, the venue of the first match in England, the date of the first English rules and the founding date of the international federation all come in more than one version.
- Legends are left out or labeled. Where a claim rests on a single source with no primary evidence, we either leave it out or present it as that source's claim.
- Results carry their year. Records and title counts are given as of a stated year, because polo's leading players are still adding to them.
What this section covers
Start with the origins of the game in Persia, Central Asia, Byzantium, China and Mughal India, then Manipur and the British, where the modern game took shape. The national pages follow polo into England, the United States and Argentina. Later pages cover Olympic polo, how the rules and equipment changed, the international era of the Westchester Cup and the World Polo Championship, women in polo, notable players and royal polo. The timeline puts the dated events in one table, with the disputed ones marked.
If you want the rules of today's game rather than its past, the Learn section explains how a match works, and governing bodies explains who writes the rules now.