Guo Xiaolong paints a picture of a match from another age that sounds a lot like a scene out of a Shaolin movie. He talks about men in silk robes with a sash around their hips in the Chinese hinterlands, flinging oak branches on large swathes of grasslands, slapping a ‘fireball’ that could be seen in pitch dark nights.

Growing up in Morin Dawa, Xiaolong heard stories of these games from hundreds of years ago from his father, who heard from his father, and so on. The British, who passed the game to their colonies, called it hockey. The Chinese had another name for it: beikou. “But the point is,” Xiaolong says through a translator, “that we have played hockey for several hundred years in China.”