Pine Valley Golf and Country Club

It all started with Arnold Palmer. In 1982, Hong Kong tycoon Henry Fok approached Palmer to design the first golf course in post-Reform and Opening China. Hand-built by manual laborers, the result was Chung Shan course in Guangdong Province, which opened in 1984. Twenty years later, China is now home to the world’s largest golf club, while more than a dozen of the world’s top players have designed golf courses in China.

In a country where wealth and status are ostentatiously flaunted, golf’s emerging popularity in China is hardly surprising. There are now over 300 courses here, ......Chinese clubs will look to operate more moderately-sized, sustainable, and therefore more profitable, facilities in the future. “As golf grows in China, there has to be a shift away from the bigger, better and more exclusive. I hope China can learn from what has been happening in Dubai, where every project has to be more luxurious, more glamorous and more ‘everything’ than the last one. This can’t go on forever. But the development of golf in China is very much going this way,” he says.