A recent article in China Daily USA reports that only the rich play golf in China.   Chinese golf is certainly elitist, keeping with the Chinese tradition of preserving luxury goods for the emperor and his circle.  That’s part of golf’s attraction to young people, who flood the annual golf shows in Guangzhou and Beijing—they aspire to a lifestyle that includes playing golf.  Membership fees at Chinese golf clubs—and there are no daily fee courses in China, both for economic and cultural reasons— range from 100,000 to 1.7 million Yuan, or in US dollars, between $15,685 and $266,650.  And this in a country with an average per capita income of $4,400, compared to the US’s $46,860.

One avid Chinese golfer, described in the China Daily story as a Beijing businessman who plays golf every day and spends $15,640 annually to support his habit, called golf “green opium,” linking it to another famous addiction introduced to China by the West.   Britain’s opium smuggling from India led to the world’s first drug wars, the 19^th century Opium Wars.   American merchants were also complicit in this trade.   These original narcotraficantes’ ruthless disregard for the Chinese peoples’ well-being was equal to the contempt any Mexican or Colombian drug lord holds for the gringos.

The Original Chinese Golfer? The Ming Emperor Xuande, 15th Century.

Now China’s emperor is called the Premier, and he’s no longer born into the job.  The premier’s courtiers–the inner circle of the ruling Communist party–play golf.  There is a tight link in China, despite its official adherence to communism, between wealth, privilege and political power.   The government’s policies since 2004 have officially circumscribed golf’s development, in order to preserve farm land and water.   But this official moratorium by the State Council was ignored until the summer of 2011, when, as the China Daily article puts it, “11 Chinese ministries collectively ordered new checks on all golf courses to prevent illegal land use and seizure and to ensure no loss of farmland in China.”

Enforcing the moratorium has had a powerful effect on the group of western golf course architects, project managers, course operators and others who have a stake in China’s golf industry.   The collapse of the US real estate market had already vitiated the demand for their services at home.   China is without question the most powerful developing market in golf, and the uncertainty over its future is very worrisome to industry insiders, among whom I include myself.

1493 helped me understand how China’s golf scene fits into larger patterns of Chinese politics and history.   I’ve wondered why, if there really was a moratorium in place since 2004, our clients in the provinces tended to pay it little heed.   It’s partly because China is a culturally complex country, where conflicts between the capital and the provinces are historically endemic.  Local leaders in Fujian province, or in Yunnan or Sichuan or Guangdong, have always tried to trick the big boys in Beijing.

Two years ago I was riding from the city center of Chengdu toward a site where our client intended to develop a large real estate project with 36 holes of golf.   Chengdu is the capital and most important city in Sichuan province, a region admired throughout China for its natural beauty and cuisine.   Giant pandas are native to the bamboo forests along the mountain slopes in western Sichuan.

As we were driving south, I noticed a complex of buildings that looked sort of like the Bird’s Nest stadium in Beijing, but on an even grander scale.  There were a number of linked buildings nestled within elaborately landscaped grounds, but no evidence of any activity going on in any of them.   I asked our client what these buildings were, and got a wan, wry smile in reply.

Sichuan province, you’ll recall, had a terrible earthquake in the spring of 2008.    The epicenter was about 80 kilometers northwest of Chengdu, but the quake was felt as far away as Beijing.   Schools collapsed, and thousands of children were killed, which led to charges of corruption against the officials in charge of building the classrooms.  More than 70,000 people were killed and millions left homeless.   Premier Wen Jiabao came down from Beijing to assess the damage and assist in guiding the rescue operations.  And here’s where the new building complex comes back into the picture.

This was the new administrative headquarters for the party and the municipal government.  Designed by the French architect Paul Andreu, who also designed the new opera house in Beijing, the complex reportedly cost $180 million.  A new “Technology and Science Enterprising Center” was also part of the complex.  In the context of millions of people left homeless by the earthquake, coupled with intense public criticism over shoddy construction practices having contributed to the loss of life, the big cheeses from Beijing ordered the Sichuanese to get rid of these new buildings.    Local officials announced that they would sell them.   That’s why they were sitting empty a year later.   But according to a BBC report in the spring of this year, the buildings have not been sold.    As Charles Mann demonstrates in 1493, that’s a typical narrative in China.  Orders come down from Beijing, local officials announce their capitulation, and then nothing more happens.

“In the feud- and faction-ridden Ming court,” Mann writes, referring to the period between 1368 and 1644, when China first encountered western traders arriving by sea, “government policies were often accidental by-products of ministerial intrigues, enacted with little regard for their actual effects.”   Echoes of these Ming policies reverberate off the walls today in Zhongnanhai, the Beijing neighborhood where the present government is headquartered.

Mann writes about the wonderfully convoluted trade practices that evolved among Chinese and European merchants, for example, especially the relationship between Fujianese and Spanish traders through the port of Manila in the Philippines.   The emperors wanted a monopoly on trade, just as the current government preserves its monopoly on land.   But the policies prohibiting trade didn’t work for the emperors, and the current land policies have created a giant headache for the central government.

Throughout it all, the qualities that have made China preeminent in so many arenas, whatever the shifts in regimes or policies, shine through.   Our tendency to think of Chinese manufacturers producing products for the global economy as something unique to the post-Mao era is misplaced, as Mann makes clear.   The Chinese in the Philippines were restricted to a ghetto adjacent to Manila called the Parián.  “Parián artisans and merchants…”—most from Fujian province, Mann notes—“sold the Spaniards everything from roof tiles to marble statues of baby Jesus—‘much prettier articles than are made in Spain,’” noted a Spanish clergyman in Manila, “and sometimes so cheap that I am ashamed to mention it.”

Chinese tailors were also making “perfect knockoffs of the latest European styles.”   The Europeans then tried to abolish trade in finished goods, wanting only the cloth—rehearsing disputes that would echo in modern trade agreements.

Mann also describes how the introduction of American crops—particularly the sweet potato, maize, and tobacco—radically transformed the Chinese countryside.  Vast new regions of Sichuan, for example, which is described prior to the end of the 18^th century as a “big, empty place,” were settled.  Just as the potato facilitated a population boom in Ireland, with tragic consequences, the American crops introduced to China instigated a series of transformations that ruptured the Emperor’s control over the provinces.  Forests cleared to grow tobacco, even though the crop was officially prohibited, resulted in shortages of rice and inflated food prices.   Hungry people will fight to survive, and rebellions against imperial authority punctuate China’s history.   China’s current rulers obsess over food security.   There is a direct link between the government’s commitment to low food prices and its complicated attitude toward golf development.

Tulou in Fujian

There isn’t space to review all of Mann’s analysis here, but I recommend that anyone with an interest in China’s economy—and especially people in the golf business—pick up a copy of 1493.   Pay close attention to “Part Two: Pacific Journeys.”   Among the episodes of Chinese history recounted in 1493 is the tale of the Hakka people after the introduction of American crops to China.    The Hakka historically practiced slash and burn agriculture on hilly, marginal land in southern China, occupying parts of Jiangxi, Fujian, Guangdong, and Hainan Provinces.  They lived collectively in large, round, well-defended structures called tulou.   They quickly adopted tobacco as a cash crop, contributing to the crisis described above.  The environmental effects of the deforestation practices following the introduction of tobacco are still in evidence in southern China.

The new Mission Hills golf resort on Hainan Island is one of China’s grandest golf developments, following on the success of the original Mission Hills in Shenzhen.   There are ten new courses designed by Schmidt-Curley, along with villas, hotels and spa.   It’s a grand complex, the equal or better of any golf resort in the world.   And one of the architectural themes at Mission Hills Haikou is a tribute to the tulou.   Guests with a view from the upper floors of the hotel toward the south will see the rounded walls of a large faux-tulou.   Merging an ancient Chinese architectural style with the grandiose amenities of a modern golf resort, Mission Hills’ version of the tulou expresses a typically contemporary Chinese affection for the ancient and enduring leavened with the allure of foreign luxuries.

Charles Mann's "1493" Illuminates the Origins of the Global Economy

Apart from its misleading subtitle, Charles Mann’s  1493.  Uncovering the New World Columbus Created, is a book to celebrate.  (Columbus’ personal contribution to the creation of the new world Mann describes was roughly the same as Johannes Gutenberg’s to the invention of word processing.)    But Mann is using “Columbus” as a kind of synecdoche for the class of European explorers-conquerors-traders who did in fact inaugurate the process of globalization which created the world we now inhabit.

1493 is a bracingly persuasive counter-narrative to the prevailing mythology about the historical significance of the “discovery” of America.  Pious European pioneers subduing the wilderness to plant a city on a hill and all that.   It’s a companion to Mann’s 2005 study of the pre-Columbian world,1491, which examined not merely the civilization of the Americas before the arrival of the Europeans but the devastating effects of old world diseases among the people of the new world.

Summarizing a generation’s worth of scholarship on the complex effects of the mingling of the “old” and “new” worlds, 1493 carries on this line of enquiry by illuminating the political, cultural and biological ramifications of what Mann refers to as the “homogenocene”—the resurrection of Pangaea, the supercontinent, connected this time not by the slow grinding power of geology but by the sinews of commerce.

1493 is inspired by the work of Alfred Crosby, whose studies of the deeper biological effects of what he called the “Columbian exchange” were greeted with a yawn when he started publishing in the early 1970s, but whose brilliance and originality soon after would not only command respect among scholars but inspire a whole new field of enquiry—the meta-history of the environment.   1493, combining original reporting and research by Mann with a survey of the scholarship Crosby’s work stimulated, examines how the European encounter with the Americas, as well as its corollary, the yoking of Europe and the Americas with the continents of Asia and Africa, the latter through the cruel vector of slavery, profoundly altered the whole world.

Many Oregonians have vacationed in Zihuatanejo, Mexico, sunbathing and swimming along the Playa la Ropa.   What they may not know is that this “beach of the clothes” is named for the silk garments which washed ashore when a galleon bringing goods from Asia was wrecked by a storm.   Mann visits Manila to recount the complicated history of this trade between China and the west, fueled by gold and silver from the new world (mined and transported by African slaves), transshipped through Mexico on its way to Madrid, hauled across the Pacific between Manila and Acapulco on ships manned by polyglot crews.

Food crops from the new world were especially influential in the creation of the global economy, a story never told better than in 1493.   Everyone knows how important the Andean potato was to European agriculture—and the indispensible tomato to Italian cuisine.   The mid-19^th century Irish famine, its effects still felt, is likewise a well rehearsed tale whose lineaments are incomprehensible without some knowledge of the biology of the Columbian exchange.   And given its grim effects—modern Ireland’s population is still smaller than its 19^th century peak—one might assume that the Columbian exchange was deleterious.   Mann persuasively argues the opposite.

“Transplanting the potato to Europe and the sweet potato to China created catastrophic social and environmental problems,” Mann acknowledges.   “But it also kept millions of Europeans and Chinese from malnutrition and famine.  The huge benefits of moving species outweigh the huge harms.”

Even in the shadow of the most glamorous shops in Beijing, vendors grilling sweet potatoes add spice to street life, especially on cold winter days.

Astonishing facts accumulate throughout 1493.  Japanese samurai guarded silver shipments between Acapulco and Veracruz in the 17^thcentury.  The samurai were exempted from the racial laws prohibiting non-Spaniards from carrying weapons so they could “wield their katanas andtantos,” as Mann writes, to fend off bandits.    By the mid-18^th century, the militias guarding Mexico’s Pacific coast against British raiders were “a force of morenos, pardos…”—that is mixed-race Afro-Indians and Afro-Europeans, categorized by the colonizers in a hapless attempt to name every possible combination of genetic admixture over multiple generations—“…Spaniards and chinos, the latter mostly Filipinos and Fujianese.”

1493’s focus on Africans in the new world is its greatest contribution.   At the time Great Britain’s American colonies declared their independence almost three hundred years after Columbus’ landfall, more African immigrants had arrived in the new world than Europeans.    Most did not come voluntarily, of course, but once they arrived they collectively shaped (or escaped) the culture of the eclectic new societies they found themselves in.

They mingled with the native peoples, and with the Europeans—culturally, sexually, linguistically.  New world societies are so distinctive from European societies in part because of the African influence flowing through America’s cultures.  Americans have been reluctant to acknowledge this truth, in part because of the depth of American racism.   But writers, from Mark Twain to Ralph Ellison to William Styron to James Baldwin, have understood that America became as much an African as a European place, and Mann does more to illuminate why that is so that any popular historian before him has ever managed.

1493 is rich in detail, analytically expansive and impossible to summarize.  Reading Mann’s accounts of Africans forging bonds with native peoples throughout the Americas, for example, I thought about the Ramapough Mountain people in New Jersey, a so-called remnant population of mixed African-Indian-European heritage whose community has been destroyed by toxic dumping from a Ford Motor Company assembly plant.   (HBO aired a documentary about this history called “Mann v Ford,” although the plaintiff was not connected to Charles Mann.)   Reading 1493 showed a link between Henry Ford’s epic failed attempt to build an Amazonian rubber empire in the 1920s with the Ramapough’s futile battle two generations latter for justice in America.

1493 deserves a prominent place among that very rare class of books which can make a difference in how we see the world, although it is neither a polemic nor a work of advocacy.   Thoughtful, learned, and respectful of its subject matter, 1493 is a splendid achievement.

Famous Foreigner Forrest, Founder of the Ping Dynasty

Steve is a thoughtful and thorough person, and he’s been making a serious effort to learn some Mandarin.  Our first Chinese employee, Jackson Van, tries to help him, but Steve, like every laowai, stumbles over the demanding complexities of tone and puzzles over how tonal shifts undetectable to a non-native speakers ear can lead to dramatic shifts in meaning.

Steve’s also tall, and really sticks out in the rural areas where we often go on site visits.  Once in a small village a group of teen-aged girls came squealing up to Steve, begging to have their pictures taken with the giant laowai, so we started calling him Famous Foreigner Forrest. 

We’re in Beijing today, where it’s cold.   Our taxi driver started laughing when we all piled into his little cab–three big foreigners and Jackson.  He nodded toward me and said something while smiling broadly.   I asked Jackson what the cab driver said.  “You have a big nose,” Jackson said.

Steve’s also studying Chinese history and culture, in part so that he won’t commit a major design faux pas.    The art of feng shui is the key to understanding the Chinese approach to landscape design.  It would be a mistake, for example, to have a water fall or stream flowing away from a clubhouse.  Water represents wealth and good chi, so you don’t want it floating away.  We’re trying to avoid making major cultural blunders, although sometimes it’s hard to see past our gigantic noses.

Chinese history is reckoned by its dynasties–the names given to the eras of particular rulers and their descendents.  The Shang and the Zhou and the Qin were among the early dynasties, but the last two ruling houses of China are also the best known in the west: the Ming, from the 14th to the 17th centuries, and the Qing (also known, less euphonically, as the Manchu), which lasted until the last emperor effectively relinquished power in 1912. 

Now that golf is booming in China, Steve suggests that the current age should be known as The Ping Dynasty. 

We think this has a nice ring to it, so in recognition of Steve’s coinage, this posting is, we believe, the official notice of the world’s first written use of the phrase “The Ping Dynasty.”

Glee All Around

I was wearing my Ryder Cup sweater, and everywhere I went people pointed to the logo and said, “grand, wasn’t it?”  And off we were on a cheerful discussion about how wonderful the Ryder Cup was and how good it will be for European golf.   They’re not talking about the players alone, although they’re happy to celebrate with McDowell and his teammates Rory McIlroy and Padraig Harrington, two Ulstermen and a Dubliner.  Unlike most American pros, the Irish triumvirate maintain close links to their homeland.  They’re embraced by the fans in a way that the more lofty American pros may not always be.  Most American pros move to Florida or Texas for tax reasons, while the Irish heroes stick around home.   The Irish fan base depends less on an abstract notion of patriotism than on genuine links of friendship and affection between them and Padraig, Graeme and Rory.  Ireland’s a small place, so to have three such outstanding professionals competing on the world stage generates a lot of national pride.   Irish tourism is heavily linked to golf, so more golfers coming to Ireland on holiday will provide a sustainable boost to the economy.

I stopped by the National Gallery of Art to look at a couple of my favorite paintings: the great Caravaggio that was the subject of Jonathan Harr’s wonderful book, The Lost Painting, and a small canvas called “Oxen in the Sea” by the Spanish impressionist Joaquin Sorolla y Bastida.  The Caravaggio is The Taking of the Christ, and how it ended up in Ireland is the unlikely story Harr tells so well in The Lost Painting.  You will probably not be surprised to learn that bureaucratic duplicity and the avoidance of taxes help explain the Italian role in misplacing a Caravaggio in the first place.

The Sorolla painting is special for a couple of reasons.  Two large oxen wading into the surf fill the canvas.  Their bright orange hides shine like marmalade under the Mediterranean sun—entirely apropos, once you know the story of the aquatic cattle.   James Michener, the American novelist whose genre of fictionalized historical narratives once topped the best-seller lists, worked as a merchant seaman in his youth.  He was a deckhand on a real sailing ship, one of the last commercial vessels conveyed by the wind.  In a wonderful memoir about his love of the Iberian peninsula, Michener wrote about taking on a load of oranges in Valencia.  Because there was no real port, he wrote, the oranges were hauled out to the ship by teams of oxen yoked to a barge.  The oranges were then loaded into barrels filled with sea water, and the jostling on the voyage to England loosened the rinds and prepared the oranges for conversion into marmalade.

Several years ago I was in an orange grove near Valencia and asked the locals if they had ever heard of the swimming cows.  None had.  I had hoped that descendents of these special cattle had been preserved as a heritage breed, but apparently not.  Some of the orange groves now are housing estates achored by golf courses.  No role for the cows in this scheme.

So it was a great joy for me to discover Sorolla’s painting several years ago in Dublin.  When I went looking for it today, I was disappointed to see that the gallery where I remembered it hanging was closed for renovation. I mentioned this to a guard standing nearby, who told me, no worries, it’s just been moved, and could be found in gallery 37.  “Were you at the Ryder Cup?” he asked, pointing to my sweater.  When I told him yes, he expressed his delight at the outcome, and we had a ten minute talk about the first two days’ rain, the postponement of the singles’ matches to Monday, and the glorious outcome for Europe and Ireland.  “It was grand,” he said.  “Your man stood tall on that putt,” he said, and I knew he meant McDowell on 16, the putt that took the heart out of Hunter Mahan.

"Beach at Valencia" by Joaquin Sorolla--the famous swimming cows.

“Oh, aye,” he conceded, gracious as Mahan picking up McDowell’s putt on 17.

Fowler’s astonishing final four holes confirmed the brave heart Lorena Ochoa observed when she was paired with Fowler in a pro-am at the Turning Stone Resort several weeks before the Ryder Cup.  Given that McDowell said that the pressure of the final holes in a Ryder Cup singles made his last 18 at the US Open this summer at Pebble Beach “like playing nine holes with my dad at Portrush,” Fowler’s performance is even more compelling, because without his half, the McDowell-Mahan match would have meant nothing.

Mahan’s meltdown in the press conference inspired the only mean-spirited reaction I heard in Ireland.   A talk show on Setanta—kind of Mick and Mick in the Morning—played the sound track from the press conference and then said, “you can’t be crying when you lose.  OK to cry for joy, but not for losing.  You need to congratulate your opponent and step away.”   They saw it as self-indulgent.  And although I am pretty sure I saw a couple of sniffles from Edoardo Molinari after Fowler’s knife into the heart on 18, no one at Setanta seemed to regard that as untoward.  But then Molinari did end up on the winning side.

As a vendor of golf course design services, I was delighted, too, with the European victory.  I think it will stimulate interest in golf globally, and maybe even jump-start the long discussed Italian initiative to develop golf tourism in a country that already leads the world in tourist attractions in everything but golf.

Like ping-pong in the Nixon era, maybe golf today can heal the rifts among nations and restore a sense of friendly competition among the peoples of the earth as a substitute for more belligerent solutions.  All hail Ricky Fowler, avatar of golf’s new age.

Celtic Manor’s Twenty-Ten course sits in the flood plain of the River Usk, which meanders in a big ox bow along which the 2^nd, 7^th, 8^th and 9^th holes run.  A series of lakes was excavated in the center of the Ten Twenty to generate the earth used to elevate the golf course and manage the storm water running off the steep surrounding hills.  But there was so much water on Friday it saturated the soils and made it impossible to play golf, even with lift and place rules in place.

The spectators slogging around the perimeter of the fairways stirred up a quagmire, but the soils mercifully are not clayey, so you could at least get a foothold on the slopes.  When I first saw how steep the slopes were running down to the course I was sure the spectators would be dropping like soldiers in the front battlelines, but the galleries managed the slopes with the skill of Welsh goats.  Because the higher elevations provided excellent panoramas, people were bunched along the hills above the 15^th, 16^th, 17^th and 18^th holes, moving along with the final group on the first day’s matches finally concluded early Saturday afternoon.

I took up a spot to the right of the 15^th green, the reachable par four that architect Robert Trent Jones, Jr., who I ran into on the shuttle bus on the way to Celtic Manor, told me was his favorite hole.  Jones designed the original layout of the Wentwood Hills course at Celtic Manor, part of which was borrowed for the hybrid purpose-built Ryder Cup course, the Twenty-Ten.  European Golf Design’s Ross McMurray added nine new holes along the River Usk on land unavailable to Jones when his firm laid out Wentwood Hills.

Historian James Hansen has a piece about the creation of the Twenty Ten Course, which he described in an email to me as “pretty controversial,” in the latest issue of Golf Course Architecture. (http://www.golfcoursearchitecture.net/Article/Another-Ryder-Cup-concession/1917/Default.aspx)  The controversy arises simply from Jones asserting his in role in the creation of the revised course as well as his authorship of the original.  “Any thoughtful analysis of the golf course’s design history,” Hansen writes, “should therefore give full co-credit to Robert Trent Jones Jr and Ross McMurray.”

Although I had no hand in any of this, I was the CEO of Robert Trent Jones II when this work was done, and I can confirm, as Hansen documents, that a shaper from RTJ II, Bob Harrington, was on loan to the Twenty Ten team during the construction of the course to make sure there was a continuity in the look and character of the course’s details—its green surrounds, its bunker, the lake edges, the tee styles and so on.   EGD and Harrington did a good job, as the original holes blend pretty seamlessly with the additions.

The 15^th is one of the original holes, a dog-leg right par four playing along and then over a stream feeding into the Usk along the eastern boundary of the property.  It makes the transition up into the steepest part of the course, holes 16 through 18, which tuck up into the base of the hills along Twenty Ten’s southern edge.  When the hole was originally built, the designers were prohibited from clearing trees along the drainage channel, so the green site was hidden from the tee.  The hole plays on the card at 377 yards, but on a direct line of flight is 270 or so.  Jones told me that “players could always try to go for the green but it was a blind shot and pretty risky.”  Now, with a clean path carved through the trees the players can see exactly where they’re trying to go, and for the Ryder Cup players the fairway along the left might as well not exist.  This is essentially a 21^st century par three. 

I hiked out to a greenside seat at 15  about an hour before the first group, the fratelli Molinari, Edoardo and Francesco, and their opponents, Hunter Mahan and Zack Johnson, arrived in their foursome match.  Both teams hit the green, to great cheers.  By now thousands of people had arrived to surround the green, a number that continued to swell until the last group to play the hole, Americans Stewart Cink and Matt Kuchar, conceded an eagle putt to their Irish competitors, Rory McIlroy and Graeme McDowell, after Kuchar drove in the left greenside rough, Cink blasted over the green into high rough, Kuchar bladed it across back into the bunker, where Cink gouged it out for a conceded five.   They were the only team not to make at least par, and mostly the hole was halved with birdies.

Our group of spectators to the right of the 15th hole couldn’t see the tee, so we depended on clues coming from the fans gathered directly behind the green to tell us when the drives were launched.  As soon as the shot was underway we could gather from their enthusiasm if it was a good or not.  Most players hit the green, and almost all of those were long. 

There were both Europe fans and USA fans in the group behind the green.  About a dozen Yanks in red, white and blue sweat suits set up a chant of “USA, USA…,” which was answered with a less then stirring “Europe, Europe…”  Nobody lives in Europe, of course—they live in Ireland, the UK, Sweden, Spain, Italy, Germany—Europe’s a notional place, not home to anyone, so the chant was limp and feeble, an echo of the European parliament. 

But the fans still possessed the legendary imagination which has made European sports’ crowds famous.   When the third group of foursomes hit its first tee shot on 15, the yobs behind the green yelled “Fore!” and along with everyone around me I ducked, then heard a great laugh when the shot landed on the green.   Two groups later, they yelled “Fore” again, but no one moved until Bubba Watson’s tee shot, pulled fifty yards right, crashed into the gallery.  Talk about the boy who cried wolf!  Jeff Overton was left with an awful pitch and the Americans lost the hole, made memorable by the creativity of the European gallery.

China is now the biggest car market in the world, overtaking the US much more quickly than anyone looking at the market ten years predicted.  China’s cities are huge and growing.  China’s stimulus program invests heavily in infrastructure and public works.  The airports in China are modern and efficient, the planes are newer than in any American carrier’s fleet, and the flight attendants, given that there are no statutes in China protecting against age or sex-discrimination, are mostly pretty young women.

As the NY Times’ Thomas Friedman frequently points out, China is also taking the lead in green energy technology, driving down the price of wind turbines and solar panels, although with abundant coal China’s current energy needs are largely met by fossil-fuel plants and hydropower, which has its own environmental and social costs.   The Chinese government and Chinese companies promote green technologies, but only one percent or so of China’s power is solar.  Still, if they’re talking about doing it, odds are they will accomplish it.  In the meanwhile, the Chinese economy is starting to consume as well as produce, and nowhere more dramatically than in the golf course communities springing up all over China.

 “Golf is noble recreation and men’s sport for 500 years” reads the English version of a website promoting a golf course community in Sichuan Province.  The language here may be eccentric, but the passion for golf and the good life it expresses is earnest and, in an odd way, moving.  There’s no cynicism here, and while the tone may reflect the hyperbolic sparkle of ad copy, the sensibility behind it somehow conveys sincerity rather than cupidity.   The person writing this copy—or translating in good faith an English version of the Chinese shill—writes about golf with the reverence of an 19^th century St. Andrean:

“If football embodies the original wild and doughty individuality of men, golf expresses their politeness, taste, and temperament combining modesty with arbitrariness.

“A white ball through five centuries follows the gentlemen’s demeanor including self-discipline, self-esteem, courtliness and good temper from of old. This noble sport becomes a leisurely recreation mode favored by man talents at all times. Although it is not popular among all people, it is always prevailing.”

In America, alas, golf is not always prevailing.

The Royal sits on a dead flat site, and no longer is much of a challenge for the club’s best players, who are a pretty distinguished group.  The course record is held by Arjun Atwal, the  only Indian professional ever to play full-time on the American PGA Tour.  Atwal grew up in Kolkata and learned to play at the Royal, though he now lives in Florida.

On a hazy morning in early December, I was invited to join the Royal’s captain, Aveek Sarkar, for a playing tour of Royal’s front 9.   A media mogul who tees off an dawn almost every day, the captain possesses a stately swing and a steady game.  Rounding out our foursome were Gaurav Ghosh, a very good amateur player from a family of distinguished tee merchants, and Shiv Shankar Prasad Chowrasia, winner of the 2008 Indian Masters, a European PGA Tour event.  Among the players in the field Chowrasia conquered were Ernie Els, Thomas Bjorn and Atwal.

Compact and with a lovely smile, the player known as Chipputtsia for his great skill around the greens, takes down the Royal with ease.  The green-keeping crew live in a small settlement surrounding the course’s maintenance facilities, dead in the heart of the grounds.  Chowrasia’s father was a green keeper who lived with his family near the 9^th green.  As a boy, Chowrasia hung around the course, hoping for a chance to play, and was taken under their wings by some of the club’s members, who recognized his talents.  In 1997, when he was 21, Chowrasia turned professional.  He has since won eight times on the Indian Tour.

The captain stewed as Ghosh and Chowrasia piled on the birdies, proof that the Royal had lost its teeth.   “This should be the hardest course in India,” he said.  “Now it’s too easy.”  He was not looking for a course that imitated the cool and elegant American-style layouts popping up across India, but preferred a classic parkland course which would preserve the Royal’s heritage while stiffening its defenses.  He’s campaigning now for a major renovation.

Recently the Royal had received a modest partial makeover, inspired not by strategic or aesthetic interests, but, in the only such instance I have ever heard of,  in response to a political struggle.   Ten years or so ago, local residents starting clambering over the fence with their cricket gear and footballs, claiming the fairways as pitches.  They dared the members to tee off into their matches, evoking a series of confrontations.   The club’s CEO was assaulted and had his arm broken.   The police came.   The neighborhood sportsmen set the clubhouse verandah on fire.

That’s when the club decided to corrugate some fairways.  The undulations they ordered are neither deep nor dramatic, but proved effective in discouraging bowlers and batsmen.  The new shapes had no effect on the Royal’s vulnerability to low scores.

The clubhouse has been repaired.  After our round, we repaired there for omelets and tea.  After he won the Indian Masters, Chowrasia was invited to join the club.  Though he grew up on the grounds, and lived a few hundred yards from the clubhouse for most of his life, when he accepted the invitation to join the club last year, Chowrasia stepped foot in the clubhouse for the first time.  He was surprised to see pictures of himself holding trophies aloft on the clubhouse walls.

In Italy they now love much more Tiger.  He’s more famous now than he ever was before.   Every day it was front page for like two weeks.  People, they don’t care about golf, now they’re talking about Tiger.  And Italians, they don’t care about the women–so what?  But nobody in Italy realized how much money Tiger makes!  The top footballer in Italy, he makes five million or ten million–not so impressive.  But Tiger, he’s making more than 100 million.  This is impressive to Italian people!  I think when Tiger starts playing again, sponsors in Europe, they will pay him more.

Great Wall North of Beijing

A Great Chimney

My friends Robert Devine and Shan Zhou are developing a fantastic eco-resort at the base of a section of the Great Wall north of Beijing.  Almost 20 kilometers of Great Wall forms a looping boundary of the valley into which the amenities of the  resort will be fitted.  It runs atop a ridge line that’s so steep in places that the stairs to ascend it have the pitch of a ladder.  The views are astonishing, and it’s impossible to be on it without feeling admiration for the people who were able to build it.   Of the 15 or so square kilometers the Great Wall Resort will control, only 3% will have any buildings or development associated with the Resort.  The rest is a combination of forest, natural landscapes, and traditional farming modified by a commitment to organic and sustainable practices.  They are also planting vineyards.   Beijing’s climate is a  mix of Houston and Stockholm’s, so getting the right grapes will be a challenge.  But Robert and Shan are passionate about doing the right thing, so I expect the Great Wall Resort will be known before too long as one of the world’s great getaways.   What they won’t do is continue certain local building practices.  As we were walking through a tiny village coming back to our car after several hours on the Great Wall, Shan pointed out the chimney on the house we were passing–made with Great Wall bricks.  The locals have been mining the wall for generations, just as people do world-wide when regimes fall and old defenses crumble.  The Coliseum in Rome was a handy quarry for the Church for centuries.   People living now at the base of the Great Wall now may have ancient memories of ancestors forced to build the damn thing.   There’s no sentimentality about the Wall.  The Wall also provides some jobs–after hiking up about 800 meters to the base of the local Wall and then hand-over-hand up a makeshift ladder to reach the top, I was feeling proud of my fitness when I heard a loud “ni hao,” looked up and saw an 80 year man smoking a cigarette and offering to sell me a bottle of water from the cooler he’d shlepped up to his mini-kiosk on top of the ridge.

 August 2009