Chonburi Races Buffalo Bareback Down a Hundred Metres of Dirt and Judges a Beauty Contest Between the Heats

The buffalo racing at Chonburi, eighty kilometres south-east of Bangkok, is expected on Sunday the twenty-fifth of October. The date is not formally confirmed and rarely is until close to the day.

The race is a hundred metres on dirt. Jockeys ride bareback, without saddle or stirrup, holding a rope. Heats run through the morning from about nine and build to a championship race in the early afternoon, and a considerable proportion of riders come off and finish in the mud, which the crowd has come to see and the riders have accepted.

Between heats there is a buffalo beauty contest, in which the animals are washed, garlanded, painted about the horns and dressed in cloth, and judged. This is not a joke appended to the racing. It is the older half of the event.

The festival marks the end of the rice harvest and has run for more than a century, using the same animals that pull the ploughs the rest of the year. That is the whole logic of it. The buffalo is the most valuable thing a rice farmer owns, the work is finished, and the animal that did the work is raced and then judged on its looks.

Entry is free and the whole thing is over by mid-afternoon. October in Chonburi runs thirty to thirty-three degrees with high humidity, which is why nothing is scheduled after the championship race.