Guangdong is the birthplace of golf in modern China and an appropriate setting for this year's open as the championship enters its second decade. The province boasts the greatest concentration of courses in the country, as well as host city Shenzhen.
Although it has been a long time coming, the open will finally make its debut in Guangdong this year. The tournament has been the exclusive domain of Beijing and Shanghai in its first 10 years.
In 1984, when the Zhongshan Hot Spring Golf Club opened near Zhuhai, it marked the return of the Royal & Ancient game to the country after an absence of about 35 years. While there had been a few courses on the mainland in the early parts of the 20th century, the sport was essentially served its death knell when communist forces liberated the country in 1949. In the early 1980s, however, with the opening up of China, the return of golf parallelled the spectacular rise of the country's economy - and no more was it more evident than in Guangdong. Following the opening of an impressive Arnold Palmer-designed layout at Zhongshan Hot Spring Golf Club - built by an army of about 2,000 workers with limited use of machinery - other courses soon followed around the province. The 1985 opening of Shenzhen Golf Club sparked a boom in courses being built around the city. With a demand for tee times increasing, mainly from golfers in Hong Kong and the expatriate community around Guangdong, new layouts in Xili Golf and Country Club and Shenzhen Tycoon Golf Club soon opened.
Today, Shenzhen and its immediate surrounding area boasts about 11 courses. Undoubtedly, the most famous is the Mission Hills Golf Club, a massive 10-course facility that boasts course designs by some of the greatest names in golf.
Guangdong boasts a network of about 60 courses, making it the largest concentration of courses around the mainland, which has about 225 clubs in total.
