China from the inside - The building of Shanqin Bay

By James Duncan, Coore & Crenshaw

The oldest cliché in architecture may be the promise to “give the client what the client wants”. It’s an admirable goal, but what if the client doesn’t really know what is wanted, or relies on the architect to determine what’s best? And what if that architect lacks an understanding of the circumstances in which he is working? Should he familiarize himself with those circumstances, rely on his own conditioned sense of what is good or do a little bit of both?

Two years ago, the firm with which I am associated, Coore & Crenshaw, faced the prospect of designing a new golf course on Hainan Island in the South China Sea. We had never worked in China before. In fact, none of us had even been to China. Our client expressed a desire to create a special golf course. We wanted to accede to this request, of course, but we didn’t know what “special” meant, or indeed should mean, in China.

While our firm believes that good golf courses can be built on many different types of properties, including ones that are relatively flat and featureless, we also maintain that a good property is the singularly greatest asset to a golf course project. We believe that the utmost care should be taken to utilize whatever natural features such a property offers, and that nothing we create can stack up against nature’s best.

Our site on Hainan Island had a bounty of natural attributes. Dramatic topography. Spectacular scenery with ocean views. Rock outcroppings, a sandy beach (with more rock outcroppings) and even a couple of caves thrown in for good measure. And while most of the property was formerly pineapple fields, it had interesting and attractive hedgerows and clumps of bushes between the fields. In one section it had an existing stone wall, in another there was an old farmer’s cottage.

Due to the configuration of the topography, it was clear from the outset that there would be a limited number of ways to traverse the property without embarking on mountain climbing, or altering the natural topography to make it suitable for golf. Giving the client what the client wanted in this case, by any measure of golf course architecture tradition in China, would have meant changing the site to make it conform to proven conventions of good golf course design. Our firm abides by such guidelines as much as the next, but dramatically altering this beautiful landscape would be squarely at odds with our most deep-rooted design principle of trying to utilize the best of what’s there.

In the end we leaned heavily towards our own architectural tradition by designing and building the golf course with primary concern for the natural state of the land. Here’s a short run-down of some of the features that resulted:

A blind approach on a par-4

The fifth hole is a completely natural version of a classic hole. There is no view of the green from the tee, or from the landing area. The hole is very similar to what was once one of the most famous holes in the world, the “Alps” at Prestwick.

A punchbowl green on a long par-3

The green on the 11th sits down in a natural hollow. It was raised a little to improve visibility from the tee and provide sufficient area for the green, but the general idea of the natural punchbowl was preserved.

Playing over a road

The tee-shot on the long par-5 13th hole plays across the entrance road to the club.

Three back-to-back-to-back short par-4s to finish the round

The longest of the last three holes measures less than 400 yards.

The use of indigenous vegetation and (actual) native grass

Virtually all the landscaping on the golf course is either existing vegetation or plant material that has been transplanted to match the existing vegetation. “Grass” from an adjacent field (a mixture of grasses, clovers, small flowers, and whatever else the cows have been munching on) has been lifted and transplanted to the golf course and used for secondary roughs and around bunkers.

A local bunker sand

The tan bunker sand is from a nearby dune ridge.

No continuous cart paths

There are cart paths only from the greens to the next fairway on each hole. Players must drive down the fairways to get around the course.
Now, this could easily be someone’s “never do this in China!” list. Most if not all courses here have continuous cart paths. The challenge in our case was that many parts of the property are highly visible from other parts. Installing continuous cart paths would have meant drastically impacting the landscape. Besides, considering the short season and the limited amount of projected play, we were by no means convinced that continuous paths were necessary. We may wind up having to install continuous paths on the course at some point in the future, but our clients (to their considerable credit) were prepared to go along with assessing the need as it arises instead of opting for the easier, but more ham-fisted, solution of installing continuous paths from the outset.

From our standpoint it would absolutely have been easier to specify top-of-the-line bunker sand and shipping it in from a remote location. Golf course architects do that all the time. But there we were, building golf holes on a beach: surely we could devise a way of using a local sand that had suitable playing characteristics and could provide a natural look for our course. With a little scouting and testing we found a good sand source just a few miles away. The sand will require some management in order for it to remain firm, but our client was once again completely supportive of our approach.

In hindsight, our client’s support of preserving the indigenous vegetation and installing more local vegetation from neighboring fields may have been their biggest leap of faith. Formal landscaping is a central part of every land development project we have seen in China. In fact it’s usually one of the first things to get started on a project, a promotions exercise of sorts. For us to suggest that they were better off without it must have seemed like suggesting to an Italian that he doesn’t need shoes. The more we learn about how things are done in China, the more impressive their commitment to the natural approach becomes to us. We have been harvesting a hodge-podge of plant material from a nearby field, and moving it to the golf course. This is the kind of turf that would be impossible to grow from seed, and while it provides an excellent secondary rough it has the added benefit of giving the new course an instant mature feel. If ever there was a poster child for how to use China’s labor advantage to create more attractive golf courses, surely this type of planting is it.

The golf course routing is highly unusual, but we like to think it fits the property. Yes, there’s a tee-shot over the entrance road, but the road is much lower than the tees. Yes, the big dune on #5 is unusual but all that was required to pay homage to one of the most loved holes in golf was a little leveling around the green site. The same is the case of the punchbowl green on the 11th.

The one point over which our clients could have sent us packing, with ample theoretical justification at least, is the finish to the round, the three short par-4s. It breaks every rule in the book. And Chinese clients are often stereotyped as “more is better” devotees, but I would challenge any supposedly sophisticated Western client to approve a routing that finishes with three short par-4s, as our client did. In our case it was mainly a matter of coming to grips with what was there, analyzing how these holes will play in their natural form and realizing that those three holes will play as different from one to the next on any two days, as another three holes of different lengths. The sixteenth is a very short downhill hole of perhaps three hundred yards. The green will be within reach for many from the tee, depending on the wind conditions. The seventeenth plays down along the beach, always with a firm cross-breeze or better. The eighteenth is a quick dogleg left, all risk reward to a green perched perilously on a slender ridge. Many shots can be made up or squandered within the space of these three short holes. Despite appearances on the scorecard, they pack plenty of punch in the ever-present wind.

The big question of course is whether any of this relates to how golf is played in China? If a punchbowl green is great fun at Lahinch or at the National Golf Links, does it follow that it provides good sport on Hainan Island? Will the Chinese golfers think that by leaving the natural vegetation, we gave up and never finished the golf course? The short answer is that we don’t know yet.

But we’re about to find out. The course is scheduled to open soon. The one thing we do know is that if the course doesn’t spark discussion about what constitutes interesting golf, we will not have infused a sufficient amount of the spirit of golf in the design. Popularity may be the ultimate measure of success for a golf course, but if a course design cannot stimulate healthy discussion, it usually means it tries to scale a bar that was set too low to begin with. Inscrutability in itself is no yardstick for measuring the success of a golf course design. In fact, the most revered of them all, the Old Course at St. Andrews, actively triggers befuddlement and even resentment in some golfers. But “fixing” what detractors consider problems (the blindness, the abrupt contours, the severe bunkers) would mean altering the essential character of the course. In this tension lies the very essence of traditional golf.

And therein, by extension, lies the vital tension that is associated with “giving the client what the client wants” in the field of classic golf course design. A design cannot be a conformist’s treatise and at the same time capture all that a good natural site offers, any more than abandoning all rules is a guaranteed recipe for success. In our case on this project, the balance tipped in favor of the whimsical, the romantic. It did so not on the basis of an existing body of evidence in Chinese golf course design, but on many detailed discussions we had with our client, on observations made about the traditional Hainan aesthetic away from golf and on a shared view of the natural property as a central part of the golf course experience.

Thanks to James Duncan of Coore & Crenshaw for this article.

Note - read the Planet Golf review of Shanqin Bay here.