I have a good friend, an Englishman, who was put into the preparatory list of Harrow Public School when she was still in the womb. The statue of one of her ancestors still stands outside the State Banquet Hall in London, and she usually cherishes a family crest ring. It is such a person who has been urging me to apply for the membership of the "Royal Audience" of the Royal Jockey Club since the beginning of this year, because as a member, he has participated in the Jockey Club for five years in a row and finally obtained the qualification of a referee. And his first thought was to recommend me to be a member of the "Royal Stand". In the 18th century, Queen Anne, who ruled Britain at that time, found a treasure trove of geomantic omen, Ascot, ten kilometers away from Windsor Castle. For more than 300 years, every June, the British royal family has held the Royal Ascot in Haskett, and it has gradually changed from exclusive to public entertainment. The Jockey Club is divided into four auditorium areas-Royal Enclosure, Queen Anne Enclosure, Village Enclosure and Windsor Enclosure. The latter three directly sell tickets to the outside world, so anyone can join in the fun. But the "Royal Auditorium" is different. It is similar to the VIP area, which was reserved for George IV and his guests. Today, it is still the seat of the royal box.And the strict membership system is implemented. New members need to be recommended by two members of the Royal Audience who have participated in the Royal Jockey Club for five consecutive years before they can join the club. After becoming a member, you are eligible to buy tickets for the Royal Audience. The Queen of England passes in front of the audience in a carriage, which is an important part of the Jockey Club every day. Jiang Xiatu uses membership system, ticket price and dress code (which will be discussed later). While the British will clearly draw a dividing line of 369 for a Jockey Club, they also secretly draw a social contempt chain. Although today’s Royal Jockey Club, to some extent, has become a big lawn party in summer, after all, the cheapest ticket for Windsor auditorium only costs about 20 pounds. It is cheaper for ordinary people to watch the Queen+horse racing and spend an afternoon in a noisy way than to go to the West End to watch a popular musical. But when I really came to the royal audience and spent a day as a member, I found that the Royal Jockey Club was the best stage to show the class division in Britain. Here, the proverb is reversed: you can’t do anything without money, but money is by no means everything. Membership, the most wonderful and vicious, let’s talk about the membership of the Jockey Club. I didn’t go to check whether this system originated in Britain, but in today’s world, I’m afraid no country’s nationals love this exclusive membership more than the British. The reason is that if we talk about the remnants of the aristocratic system and class concept in the world today, if Britain is called the second, I am afraid no country dares to call it the first. Strict membership club,Is a microcosm of this concept. People belong to a club or a small circle, which is not caused by a common interest or occupation. More importantly, it represents similar educational background and living habits, and a network of relationships that the outside world cannot easily intervene. From the 17th century to today, the British people are all enthusiastic about this. From the streets of London, especially those "gentlemen’s clubs" in Pall Mall, Chelsea or Mayfair that have no house numbers and any signs, to the "Royal Audience" that this old friend earnestly wants me to join, this system is followed. Entering the royal audience means that you have gained more privileges. For example, all the audience seats are arranged in order of distance from the finish line, and the Royal Audience is the closest to the finish line. The number of seats in the last three auditoriums is limited, which means that many spectators need to stand on the lawn all afternoon. However, the Royal Auditorium has four floors above the indoor grandstand area (all the spectators in the auditorium share the ground floor of the indoor area, but there are no seats, and they can’t see the game, just playing the role of a channel), so members can sit firmly under the sunshade and rain-proof ceiling and watch the game condescendingly. The third floor of the stands is also the seat of the royal box, and I happened to meet the queen who had just returned from the award ceremony in the corridor. In addition, the awarding ceremony after each horse race is held in the "parade ring" on the other side of the stands. The awarding ceremony is held by members of the royal family, social celebrities or even the Queen herself.Only the members of the royal audience are eligible to enter the audience of the exhibition circle. Being able to sit in the stands is the privilege of being a member of the "Royal Audience". Jiang Xiatu sounds a bit like first class on a plane, but you don’t need a referee to buy a first class ticket. No wonder some people say that this is the "most wonderful and vicious" rule invented by the British. Perhaps you will be curious, isn’t anyone disgusted with this arrangement? In a BBC interview in 2016, Juliet Slot, the then Jockey Club Commercial Director, said: "We wanted to get together, but we were opposed. We also tried to encourage guests to go to other areas, but they didn’t want to. The guests are used to their location and don’t want to change. " On the last day of the competition, I photographed the crowds standing on the lawns of "Queen Anne Stand" and "Windsor Stand" from the royal stands. Of course, if you are a local tyrant, you really want to spend money to enter the royal audience, so you can book a table in the restaurant in the area of the royal audience. The cheapest restaurant starts at more than 700 pounds per person, excluding tax. The race is not about horses, but about people. In the final analysis, the Royal Jockey Club belongs to the British "social season". At the Royal Jockey Club, you can’t see horse racing fans who study the horse racing classics tirelessly as in Hong Kong or Japan. People come to Haskett,It’s for gathering with friends, having picnics, having afternoon tea, competing for ladies’ hats and skirts, seeing the Queen of England who has never missed a game for more than 70 years with her own eyes and betting on the color of her skirt. In short, it’s for "seeing" and "being seen". As for the horse racing itself, my friends will always ask after I return to London, "How was your luck?" If you hear me say "tie", everyone laughs. "That’s a win." Winning or losing a bet on a horse is a trivial matter, and the real winner is the scenery itself. At each Jockey Club, ladies’ various hats will occupy the important pages of the media during the Jockey Club as usual. Many people will be curious, why do female spectators wear hats at the jockey club? In fact, this is not a clever trick that the ladies came up with by themselves, but if you don’t have this hat on your head, you can’t enter the stadium, which represents an ancient tradition. Since the Middle Ages, hats have been an indispensable part of women’s formal daytime dress in all walks of life in Europe. It was not until the 1950s that this custom gradually disappeared and was only preserved on special occasions, and the Jockey Club was one of them. However, the strict dress code is not only for hats, but also for ladies. I still remember the day I went to the Jockey Club, wearing a knee-length skirt and high heels, wearing a big hat decorated with feathers and flowers, and walking on the streets of London to prepare for the train station. After all, on a Saturday morning, this costume is really funny. My date is more exaggerated,In order to meet the men’s dress code, he wore a gray morning coat, with the back of his coat almost reaching his knees and a silk top hat, which seemed to have come from the 19th century. Fortunately, the citizens of London are not surprised, and they know where we are going at a glance. I met several passers-by who stopped to wish us a happy time at the Jockey Club. But as soon as I arrived at Waterloo Railway Station, I found many similar people, well dressed and in droves. Men are wearing suits or morning coat, and the girls are wearing hats and beautiful skirts as if they were going to participate in the runway show. At a glance, we will get on the same train and go to the same destination. In the ticketing area of the railway station, three of the four destinations are the Jockey Club’s Jiang Xiatu, which can be seen from the clothes, and we belong to the audience respectively. "Judge people by their appearances" has become a rule here. On the website of the Royal Jockey Club, the dress requirements of each audience are written down in great detail for people to abide by. There is no doubt that the man wearing a shirt, tie, vest and morning coat, with no lapels and a top hat belongs to the royal audience with me. A man in a suit and tie should sit in the "Queen Anne Audience", while a man in a bow tie belongs to the "Country Audience". Another detailed rule for all men is that none of them should give clues, oh no, ankles. The "Royal Audience" Dress Guide on the Jockey Club official website; The ladies in sexy strapless skirts must be going to Windsor Audience. Because whether in the royal audience or Queen Anne’s audience,Ladies are not allowed to wear strapless skirts, navel dresses and short skirts, especially jeans. Pants must be trousers. "Formal" and "elegant" are the dress requirements for the ladies in these two stands. Even the hat I wear has strict size regulations: the diameter must be greater than 10 cm. Intriguingly, for Jockey Club participants, such strict dress code has become one of the pleasures of Jockey Club. Men prepare morning coat for it, which they may never wear several times in their lifetime, and the price of top hat is staggering. Because there are only a handful of hat makers who can make top hats in modern times, their prices have also risen, and the price of ordinary felt hats has reached about 4,000 pounds. According to Bates, an old hat dealer in London, the most expensive hat they sold during the Jockey Club reached 12,000 pounds. If you really don’t want to invest, there is a small room on the box office side of the royal auditorium for renting top hats, but the number is very limited. Without this top hat, even if you have a ticket, you will be politely invited aside at the entrance. Compared with this, the price of ladies’ hats is much more approachable, but because it needs to match the color, material and style of clothes, many people begin to prepare them with great interest six months in advance. Some people will be ingenious, and the specially made hats are amazing. Some are like a big flower basket on the top of their heads, and some can’t wait to put the Eiffel Tower on their heads. Although this is the photographer’s favorite, the royal audience can’t stand this "show".So that this year, it was specially stipulated that ladies should not replace their hats with headdresses. Windsor auditorium, which has the loosest dress requirements, doesn’t even require ladies to wear hats, but most female spectators still wear hats or headdresses, even a hair band, in order to match the overall atmosphere of the Jockey Club. The internal contempt chain of the royal audience: If you step into the royal audience, you will find that the so-called internal distinction between these elites is actually far greater than that between the royal audience and the other three audiences. Here is a battle field between "old money" and "new wealth". Some people sit in the open-air seats of the restaurant and sip champagne calmly, while others, online celebrity, who came all the way from China, wore brand-sponsored clothes to send a photo of Weibo and continuous shooting for more than ten minutes beside the track. But what you never expected was that, except for the royal box, the top of the contempt chain of the royal audience was actually in the parking lot. The No.1 parking lot of Haskett Racecourse is a special parking lot for members of the Royal Audience, and has a direct entrance to the Royal Audience. Parking spaces in the parking lot can only be applied by members of the Royal Audience who have participated in it for ten years in a row, and can be passed down from generation to generation. No wonder it claims to have a longer waiting list than Whites, the most elite gentlemen’s club in London, and the waiting time is more than 100 years. Someone inherited a parking space from his mother, "and my mother had it for 40 years." If you have a parking space long enough, you can move it in to make it closer and closer to the entrance. I didn’t understand why this parking space was so important until I received an invitation from my referee.I was invited to have a picnic with his family on the day I attended the Jockey Club, and the location of the picnic was in the No.1 parking lot. Walking into parking lot 1 is like walking into a traditional English garden party in a movie. The parking lot is actually a large lawn, and there is a considerable distance between each parking space, which is enough for people to get down from the car and have a picnic-long tables covered with white tablecloths, ice buckets, boxes of champagne, glasses, drinks, tableware, fruits, various salads and cold cuts, desserts, and some people even bring their own chairs. It is said that the picnic in parking lot 1 is the easiest place to see celebrities and members of the royal families of various countries. On the day I went, the sun was fine and everything was perfect. The young boys were too hot to take off their coats and hats, only wearing vests. The ladies still wore hats with reserve. Everyone was holding glasses in their hands and eating food in small mouthfuls. Compared with the crowded and noisy street I just passed, it was like an unreal floating parallel world, a parallel world built with class, privilege and money. In addition to the No.1 parking lot, the top hat that was put down casually was divided into small circles within the royal audience. The most conspicuous is the exclusive tents of several clubs. If you haven’t got a parking space in the No.1 parking lot, but you are "superior" enough to be a member of these clubs, you don’t have to crowd around the small tables of several beverage bars with other ordinary members of the royal audience. Although there are dozens of gentlemen’s clubs in London, only a few of them are eligible to have their own tents inside the royal auditorium.Including White’s, the most elite gentlemen’s club in Britain, including Prince Charles and Prince William; And Buck’s, the club to which Bertie, a playboy, belongs in the masterpiece The Master Butler by the British novelist P.G. Woodhouse, is based. And Turf, which is said to be the "young version" of White’s Club. Of course, the doors of these clubs’ tents are only open for their members and their guests. Beginning in 2011, probably to attract more young spectators, the Royal Auditorium will hold a post-match party in the Royal Auditorium near the tent of White’s Club on the last day of the Jockey Club. Only members of the Royal Auditorium aged 18-35 can participate. Many people call this party a "public school" party. After all, how many young Britons who are eligible to become members of the Royal Audience have not studied in expensive boarding public schools and got to know the social circle that is crucial to their future? A group photo of several public school graduates in the No.1 parking lot Jiang Xiatu Some people are willing to imagine the royal audience as a world in Downton Abbey, with clothes and temples, gentlemen and ladies. It’s just that, in my opinion, except for the outdated outfit, the party held in the "birdcage" is no different from any nightclub in London, or even worse. If you have seen the movie "The Fury Club",You should know what I mean. What I still remember is a conversation when I left the Jockey Club. A "blue-blooded" youth who is in his early twenties and is about to attend a birdcage party asked me what I think of the future trend of the world. After I seriously dealt with this big topic and raised topics such as Brexit, American hegemony and global warming, I asked him, what do you think? He took a sip of gin and tonic in his glass and said with innocent blue eyes, "I just want to hear your opinion. I have no idea of my own." If I must say it, I think the world is too beautiful, and it will get better and better. "