The Shanghai Cricket Club will visit Hong Kong Cricket Club and Kowloon Cricket Club on September 20 and 21 to play two fixtures whose importance resonates back into distant history.

The first cricket match between SCC and HKCC was arranged by Major Turner in 1866 under the guise of the Interport Match. To put this in context, the first match ever Test match took place between Canada and the USA in 1844 and the first contest between England and Australia was held in 1877.

Cricket has changed a bit since the first stagings of these fixtures, which routinely were written up in the North China Daily News.  Many of the early games were played over two days, with bowlers such as Dr J.A. Lowson sending down no fewer than 37 overs in one innings. In this fixture in 1921 Edward Ivo Medhurst Barrett, remembered as Shanghai’s finest ever batsman, scored 165 runs. It was common for the sides to play two games in a year, each visiting the other for a contest in which both teams would have two innings.

On Saturday the Shanghai Dragons will take on a HKCC side at their beautiful ground  at 137 Wong Nai Chung Gap Rd, Tai Tam, Hong Kong. At stake is the historic Bokhara Bell Memorial Trophy, which is named in honour of the P & O steamship which went down with the Hong Kong team aboard it in on 10 October 1892. Only two of the cricketers survived the disaster when the ship was hit by a typhoon off Sand Island in the Pescadores on the homeward journey.

The Bokhara tragedy is recorded in a memorial window in Shanghai’s Holy Trinity Cathedral. This monument was set up by the SCC in honour of their fallen friends from Hong Kong.

The following players will be representing the SCC in Hong Kong: