Hong Kong’s Fanling golf course at centre of public housing plan wins Unesco conservation award
- City’s oldest golf course praised for establishing ‘a welcome precedent for conserving a unique typology of landscape heritage’
- Authorities took back 32-hectare portion of course in September, as part of a redevelopment plan to build thousands of public flats
Hong Kong’s oldest golf course, which is at the centre of a controversial redevelopment plan, has picked up a prize at this year’s Unesco Asia-Pacific Awards for Cultural Heritage Conservation, while the operator has said it will not be used as a bargaining chip to preserve the site.
The international agency on Thursday announced the Fanling course had won the Award of Distinction along with two others – the Dongguan Garden Residences in the mainland Chinese city of Yangzhou and Karnikara Mandapam at Kunnamangalam Bhagawati Temple in India’s Kerala state.
“The multidisciplinary effort of the Fanling golf course project has strengthened the socio-ecological commitment and ‘people-nature-culture’ relationship of Greater China’s oldest championship golf course,” the heritage body said.
“[The project establishes] a welcome precedent for conserving a unique typology of landscape heritage, one located amid increasingly urbanised surroundings and subject to larger developmental pressures.”
The jury, composed of seven international conservation experts directed by a chair, reviewed 48 project entries from eight regions across Asia-Pacific this year.
