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Price soars as topflight bird heads to China

(Agencies/China Daily)
Updated: 2011-01-15 08:44

KERMT, Belgium - A Chinese buyer paid 156,000 euros ($208,000) for a racing pigeon at an auction in Belgium on Monday, setting a new world record and sending out the message that the sport has taken off in China.

The bird, named Blue Prince, has a pedigree full of Belgian champions, which are considered to be the best in the racing-pigeon world.

And now it has a one-way ticket to a pampered retirement in which it will no longer be expected to fly vast distances quickly but father the next generation of champions in China.

During the past month, two auctions of Belgian racing pigeons have set world records - confirming Belgium as the producer of the world's most expensive birds and China as its biggest customer.

"They want to have the best pigeons, own the best pigeons, breed with the best pigeons," said Stefan Roosen after wealthy Chinese buyers helped snap up a 218-bird collection that had belonged to his late father.

The birds sold for a world record 1.37 million euros ($1.82 million) last weekend.

For the most part, the birds being bought in Belgium are not being raced in China, but their offspring will be.

In European pigeon racing, birds are taken up to 1,000 kilometers (700 miles) from their lofts and released. Races are decided by which bird flies back home the fastest.

The recent record-breaking auctions highlighted the sport's past and its future.

From its humble origins as a working-class pastime in Western Europe during the past century, pigeon racing has spread throughout the world and struck a chord in modern-day China, which escaped the worst of the global financial crisis and is now one of the few countries with money to spend on such expensive pastimes.

The Chinese Racing Pigeon Association was established in 1984 and now boasts more than 300,000 members. There are some 30 million registered racing pigeons in the country. The association issues about 10 million new leg bands every year.

The 34th Racing Pigeon Olympiad will be held in 2015 in Ningbo, a coastal city in East China's Zhejiang province where the GDP reached 433 billion yuan ($66 billion) in 2009.

"Along with the economic growth in China, more people have become interested in the sport," said Yi Minna, chief operating officer with the PiPa pigeon auction house that organized the Roosen sale.

Among the new generation of wealthy Chinese people, many like to spend their money on the best things, whether they be fine wines, luxury cars or "collections of horses, dogs and pigeons", Yi said.

"One bottle of wine remains one bottle," she said. "But if you buy a good pigeon they can have children and grandchildren."