Final Numbers and Thoughts

Days in China: 45
Cities Visited: 11
Courses Played: 13
Favorite Course: Clearwater Bay / Spring City Mountain Course
Best City: Beijing
Favorite Golf Experience: Sinking a 30-foot putt for birdie on the hardest hole of the Mountain Course
Favorite non-golf Experience: Having a four-hour dinner with eight young Chinese people I met in their apartment
Best Historical Site: Terra-Cotta Warriors


I'm back in New York after a month and a half in China, and the trip went smoother and was more interesting that I could have ever imagined. Besides my food poisoning and subsequent visit to a Chinese hospital and the fact that it rained everyday i was in Lijiang, I didn't run into any other problems and the weather was amazing. I was even luckier considering that while I was in China the country was going through the worst flooding in over a decade, and a few of the cities I visited experienced record rainfall and flooding after I left. Before the trip I was aiming for 10-15 rounds of golf in China, and if it were not for the food poisoning and bad rain in Lijiang I would have gotten 15 rounds in, but if I had altered my itinerary just a little bit there's a possibility that I would not have even reached 10 rounds.

In addition to the rounds of golf, my informal interviews and conversations with people involved in the golf industry were fascinating. I was able to speak with a major developer, caddies, businessmen who have picked up the game and take it very seriously, hackers who have no clue what they're doing on the course and people who work at courses on the business side of golf. A lot of these conversations happened by chance, like when I decided to take the company shuttle home in Chongqing because the course couldn't find an affordable cab for me. These conversations were just as informative (if not more so) than my actual rounds, and I wish that I had more opportunities for these types of conversations. However, on most days I arrived at the course and found it almost empty, so the starter didn't pair me with any Chinese people. Part of the reason is because there's so little volume at the courses that I can play alone, and part of it was that Chinese people don't like to play during the middle of the summer, when the heat index in some cities was over 110 degrees. I think that had I done this trip in the springtime I would have been able to speak more with locals, but I only have summer break, so I had no choice.

In terms of some of the non-golf aspects, Beijing continues to amaze me and it was great to return there. After coming home from Beijing, New York seems calm. New York is quieter and less hectic to me. If there's one thing that I don't miss about Beijing and other Chinese cities though, it's how nerve-racking walking around and riding in cars is. None of the cars obey traffic laws - my cabs ran red lights, drove on the shoulder of the road, drove for over ten minutes on the side reserved for opposite traffic when it was empty, passed on a double line, and did not give the right of way to pedestrians even when it was their light. In terms of new cities that I visited on this trip, Xi'an was probably my favorite. The Terra-Cotta Warriors were great, as was walking the city wall. I wouldn't spend time outside the old city walls, but inside there are some great sites, restaurants and a lot of activity in the streets.

Before this trip I had no clue how pronounced the differences between the dialects in China are. I knew that Cantonese and Mandarin are totally different, but I figured I could get around Sichuan without any issues. I was amazed at how different Beijing Mandarin and Sichuanese are. One day I asked a lady for directions in Chinese and the lady said, "wo ting bu dong" or "I don't understand." It was pretty frustrating for me in Sichuan because of this, but even in Xi'an and cities in other provinces there were some notable differences in their dialect. Some people even asked me if I lived in Beijing because I had a Beijing accent. That's another reason why I was so happy to get to Beijing, where communicating was so much easier.

Circling back to golf, what did I learn about golf in China and how it reflects Chinese cultural values? The thing that really stuck with me was my conversation in Chongqing on the company bus with a lady who worked in HR at the golf course I played. She told me she felt that Chinese people played golf because they saw it as being tied to development and wanted to do what they could to help their country develop. I was really impressed with the awareness that it would take for someone to make this calculation as well as how this showed how much they care about their country. Another sentiment I got from a handful of people was the feeling that when Chinese people have money and the economy is good, they should spend it, enjoy life and funnel money back in to the economy. China is known as a very frugal country, where citizens same most of their money. People who analyze the Chinese economy say that domestic spending needs to increase for real development to occur and to balance their economy. So it was interesting to see this other side of the mentality of Chinese people. Then, the most prevalent thought was that golf is good for business. Chinese businessmen rely so much on "guanxi" or personal relationships to so business, and golf is a part of building up that "guanxi." All of these examples to me underlie the pragmatism of Chinese people.

What is holding golf back in China? Access. So many of the courses are too expensive for the average Chinese person. I can't imagine hitting balls at a driving range for years on end before actually playing 18 holes, but that is what some people do. As I said in another post, equipment and balls are also so expensive. In order for golf to really take hold in China, there need to be more courses like Longgang in Shenzhen, where the greens fees are artificially low thanks to the local government. That was the only course I saw that was packed with players, and it still was a really nice course. I think that China needs to move away from the expensive Jack Nicklaus courses and others like that which are built for only the richest Chinese and foreigners like Koreans, Japanese and Westerners. They need to address the issue of access and cultivate knowledgeable professionals, cheaper courses (even if they're not top-notch) and maybe a program like The First Tee to spread golf. I wonder how much golf will suffer in China when their economy goes through a tough phase.

The calligraphy I got made in Beijing - On the right is says "summer 2010 golf in China" and then all of the cities I visited are listed using traditional characters

For anyone who loves golf and is interested in China, bring your clubs. You can get deals you can't get anywhere else for the quality of the courses and you can meet some great people along the way. China's best asset is its people, and spending time talking to them about golf or anything else is a great experience.

Beijing Cascades Country Golf Club

For my last day in China I went with my dad and brother to Beijing Cascades Golf Club, an Arnold Palmer designed golf course outside the fifth ring road. The weather wasn't too hot, but the typical Beijing smog made a comeback over the past few days and we couldn't see a cloud in the sky. Just like Bayhood, huge electrical towers ran through the course which was also an eyesore, but the course was nice and seemed more natural than Bayhood or some of the other courses I've played in China. The course is part of a nature preserve, so it's nice and open on the course, but I couldn't help feeling a bit claustrophobic with all of the apartment complexes either just completed or under construction around the course, as well as all of the villas that were under construction beside the course.

I didn't play how I would have liked to play for my final round in China. I was spraying the ball off the tee, not hitting good iron shots and my putting was off. Unfortunately this course put cup-savers in all of the holes which I hate, so I rimmed out a few of putts that would have dropped if the holes were just lined with dirt instead. I tried to put it together for one last hole and give myself a good look at birdie or at least a par to cap off my trip, but ended up hitting a poor approach into the eighteenth green. I hit a pretty nice chip to about six feet and took a long look at the par putt, thought I had it, but saw that also rim out of the hole. A pretty disappointing end to the trip given the way I played today, but I can't complain.

I fly back to New York early tomorrow afternoon and will do one last wrap-up post. I don't know when I'll be back in China, and at the beginning of the trip six weeks traveling mostly alone seemed like it would be a long time, but it went by pretty quickly and I feel like I could definitely do another six weeks seeing other parts of China and playing courses in more remote parts of the country.

Number one, a 398 yard par-4

The approach to number one

Number two, a 138 yard par-3

Number three, a 381 yard par-4

The approach to number four, a 561 yard par-5

Number six, a 530 yard par-5

The seventh green, a 412 yard par-4

Number nine, a 169 yard par-3

Number eleven, a 548 yard par-5

The approach to thirteen, a 466 yard par-4

Number fifteen, a 329 yard par-5

Number eighteen, a 385-yard par 4

With my my brother and dad on the eighteenth tee

Beijing

When I originally made my itinerary for this trip, I thought of starting in Beijing and ending in Shanghai, but since my family could only come to meet up with me for the first week in August and I felt that my family would enjoy Beijing more, I flipped my itinerary. Now that I've had my time in Beijing, I'm extremely happy to have made this switch. Having spent maybe one month here last year while studying abroad, I've grown to love this city. Even though last year I quickly developed a Beijing cough because of the pollution, and the clear days are few and far between, I came to love the history, sites, restaurants and shopping. The people here are also great, and since I learned Chinese from a textbook out of Beijing University, it was nice to speak the dialect that locals understood. A few times on this trip, after having a rough day in some other Chinese city I would just think about returning to Beijing and could not wait until I could return to some of my favorite places from last year. It has been an amazing finale to this trip.

We landed in Beijing during a rainstorm, which is actually a good thing in Beijing because it usually clears up the air and makes way for the rare clear days. Apparently the weather in Beijing the past few weeks has been really bad, but the day after we arrived we had two straight days of clear skies because of the rain. We had dinner the first night at SALT, a contemporary Western restaurant and one of my favorite restaurants in Beijing. Then, the next morning we started by heading to Tiananmen Square and then entered the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City, along with the Great Wall are probably the two "musts" for any visit to Beijing, and when I went to the Forbidden City last year it was extremely overcast so it was great to go and have clear skies. The Forbidden City, the residence of many Chinese emperors, is a huge compound. It's completely walled-in and is 900 meters by 750 meters. There are over 8,700 rooms and the whole complex took over 12 years to complete. The Forbidden City is pretty intimidating to try to undertake all in one visit, so we walked through the main halls and veered off every now and then to some of the rooms where the concubines lived and some less significant rooms. After the Forbidden City we walked up the hill in Jingshan Park where one can view all of the Forbidden City and then really get a sense of the scale of the palace. After the Forbidden City we went to an alleyway called Nanluogu Xiang, which has some really cool bars, cafes and shops. We stopped in at one of my favorite stores, Plastered, which sells t-shirts with screen-printed Chinese food stamps, product labels, and some tongue-in-cheek designs.

On our second day in Beijing, after finishing our round of golf we headed to the Temple of Heaven, which is where the emperor, who was the son of Heaven, reported to Heaven. He asked for blessings of plentiful harvests and for there to be peace in the kingdom. All of this was very important because when things did go wrong (famine, uprisings, etc.) it meant that the emperor had lost Heaven's mandate and his power and position could then be questioned. Besides the Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest and the Imperial Vault of Heaven, there is also the Round Altar, which is where the emperor communicated with Heaven. There's one raised stone slab in the center of the altar that every Chinese person tries to have a moment to stand on or just touch a foot to. I stood there for maybe two seconds (enough time to get a picture) before the next person nudged me off, but it's pretty cool to stand where the Chinese used to think the center of the universe was.

The next day we spent mainly at the Summer Palace, which was the royal summer retreat. The Summer Palace is built around Kunming Lake, which takes up 75 percent of the space. The Summer Palace was extremely crowded, so it was hard to find any peaceful moments, but the grounds are so beautiful that it doesn't really matter. We climbed up to some of the main buildings which are built into the mountains, then did a loop around the outside of the lake and just kind of wandered around the gardens.

The following day we started at Panjiayuan, or the dirt market, which is by far Beijing's largest "antique" market. Most of the stuff is fake, but I wasn't really looking for any antiques so I didn't mind. The market has over 3,000 stalls that sell calligraphy, jade, jewelry, ancient coins, vases, handicrafts and artwork. I only really wanted one thing, and that was a piece of calligraphy that would say "2010 summer golf in China" with all of the cities that I visited in Chinese. I was able to find the same calligrapher who I bought a Tang Dynasty poem from last year and he agreed to write it for me. He screwed up the spacing once and redid it, but the finished product looked amazing. I had him use all traditional characters and I'm really happy with it. We then went to 798, which is an old heavy machinery factory zone that has been converted to art galleries. We walked around there for a while before heading off for dinner.

Today I split up from my family and went off alone to do a few things I didn't get a chance to do last year. I started off by doing a loop around Beihai Park, which is a really nice park that surrounds a lake. There's a small island on the lake, Qionghua Dao (Jade Island), which has the White Dagoba - Beihai's most famous site. Before climbing up the White Dagoba I went up to a small bell tower on the island and hit the bell with a long wooden pole three times, which is supposed to bring safety to that person for one year. Then I went to the White Dagoba, which was built to honor a visiting Dalai Lama. I then went to the Five Dragon Pavilions, which are out in the water and are supposed to form the shape of a dragon, and finally visited the Little Western Heaven, a temple in the park. Unfortunately the weather in Beijing has turned back into thick smog so the park wasn't as nice as it is on a clear day. I then went back to UIBE, where I studied last year, to see any changes to the neighborhood and the campus. The entrance we always went through was closed because they're constructing a new building right inside of it, but I went in the other way, did a tour of campus and then went to the restaurant I ate at almost every day and had some tomatoes and eggs.

Tomorrow I'm playing my last round in China at a course right outside Beijing, and then the next day I'm back to New York.

At Tiananmen Square with the Forbidden City behind me

The first courtyard and row of buildings in the Forbidden City

Inside one of the halls (I think this is where the Emperor greeted officials and guests)

Some of the stone carving that lines the steps

Another view of the Forbidden City

One of the main halls in the Forbidden City (the emperor stashed his choice for successor behind this sign above the throne)

The Forbidden City from Jingshan Park (behind the Forbidden City in the right side is the famous Beijing performing arts center, dubbed the "egg")

The Hall of Prayer for Good Harvest

The Imperial Vault of Heaven

Looking up at the inside of the Vault

The Round Altar

Me on the spot where the emperor reported to Heaven

The Summer Palace

Another part of the Summer Palace

Kunming Lake and the Summer Palace

The calligrapher doing my calligraphy

Beihai Park and the White Dagoba

The White Dagoba

The Five Dragon Pavilions

The Little Western Heaven at Beihai Park

My tomatoes and eggs at my favorite place by UIBE

Bayhood No. 9

My dad, brother and I were invited to play Bayhood No. 9, an exlusive, members-only club in Beijing, between the fourth and fifth ring roads. We were invited by Zhao Qian, a member who my dad met on a business trip to China earlier this year. He attended UIBE in Beijing, which is the university Carleton uses for the Beijing political economy seminar. In fact, Zhao was a student at UIBE in 1989, when Carleton ran its first program out of Beijing, and he was one of the student guides who spent time with the Carleton group.

Everything at Bayhood is over-the-top. I got a sense of this when we pulled up in a taxi to the gates and the security guard explained to me that taxis weren't allowed inside the club, so we took our clubs out of the trunk on the street and some golf carts came to pick us up. Each golfer is given his own cart with two caddies, one to drive the cart and one to handle club selection and explain the holes to the golfers. One thing that I have never seen before is that Bayhood has two small leather golf bags, and the caddies divide your clibs up between them, leaving the woods in your bag, then putting long irons in an additional bag and wedges in a third bag. Then, the caddy carries the small bag to your ball and you can switch clubs really easy.

Zhao, when he heard I had a blog, said, "make sure you metion that this is the course where people take all of the corrupt officials." He also said that this was a good example of top-notch service in China, which is definitely accurate. After our round, when we walked into the clubhouse, a staff member walked beside us and asked, "how did you play? How was the course? Are there any suggestions you could give us about our service?" I was then given a packet that they give to potential members, which describes in detail some of the other services they provide and features of the course. Over 3,000 pine trees were uprooted and replanted along the course, the driving range has VIP rooms, and the club has the first PGA golf academy in Asia.

Membership? 1,080,000 RMB for one person, which is around $160,000.

Overall, the course was very challenging and in peak condition. The greens were rolling fast and true, the fairways were excellent and the bunkers were fairly deep, which is rare for courses in Asia. I liked the layout, the only critiques I have are that there are a few eyesores (watertowers, powerlines, etc.) because the course is actually in the city, one hole has a bunker in the middle of the green which is pretty gimicky and makes for an automatic three-putt even if you are on the green because you have to putt around it and then go at the hole, and parts felt a little too hilly (they had pretty flat land, so I think they went a little overboard in trying to make it look natural and rolling).

I played pretty poorly, but I expected that considering I woke up at 5:30 AM to make our 7:30 AM tee time.

The first hole, a 422 yard par-4

The approach to number two, a 541 yard par-5 (note the bunker in the middle of the green)

Number four, a 178 yard par-3

Number six, a 408 yard par-4

Number seven, a 473 yard par-4

The approach to number nine, a 550 yard par-4

Number eleven, a 423 yard par-4

Number twelve, a 587 yard par-5

Number 14, a 382 yard par-4

Number 16, a 420 yard par-4

Our convoy of golf carts, some of our caddies (we had 8 for our foursome) and the three golf bags we each had

The approach to number 17, a 535 yard par-5

Number 18, a 130 yard island green par-3 with the clubhouse overlooking the hole

Army of the Terra-Cotta Warriors

For my last day in Xi'an, I went with my family to the Terra-Cotta Warriors, which don't really need an explanation. However, to give a bit of background they were built by emperor Qin Shi Huang Di over 2000 years ago. Qin Shi Huang united China for the first time (in 221 BC I think) under the Qin and is also responsible for the building of the Great Wall. He started construction on the Terra-Cotta Warriors once he took the throne, at age 13, and the army took around four decades to complete. The warriors were put in his mausoleum, which spanned over 56 kilometers. Over 720,000 people helped in making this mausoleum, and many were later buried in the mausoleum so that none of the secrets would surface. The theory is that the emperor built this army because he thought that after death he would still be commanding China and would need this army. Therefore, people think that the mausoleum was made to replicate the world, just on a smaller scale.

The warriors were originally covered with a wooden roof, with some mats and earth above that. The warriors were all equipped with bronze weapons and painted, and no two warriors are identical. The mausoleum was accidentally discovered in 1974 by peasants who were digging a well, and archeologists have now uncovered three pits, with the main pit (pit 1) holding 6,000 soldiers and horses.

My guidebook said to start with the movie that talks about the history of the warriors and then move in reverse order from pit 3 to pit 2 and end with pit 1. That strategy was definitely the way to go, because pits 3 and 2 were a bit underwhelming, with parts of the mausoleum unearthed but very few intact warriors. Most of the pit had shards of the soldiers stuck to the floor or scattered around. However, pit 1 was amazing, and most of the following pictures are taken from pit 1. Pit 1 was in amazing condition, with the rows of soldiers restored to their original order.