There can be few golf courses in the world with such a spectacular backdrop as the Beijing International Golf Club, situated beside a scenic reservoir and the Ming Tombs, and nestling at the foot of steep hills draped by the Great Wall of China.
It is a challenging 18-hole course, with many Chinese characteristics, such as pagodas for rain shelters, and young peasant women caddies from nearby villages who know exactly what club to hand a golfer approaching the greens. The players are mostly expatriates, mainly from Beijing's Japanese community, but many of the new generation of Chinese business executives can be seen hacking their way around at weekends. Spotting a dozen well-dressed Beijing types arrive in the club house last week I murmured to a Chinese acquaintance, "Rich Chinese?" "No," she replied, "corrupt officials."
Whether this was the case or not, that response said much about how the Royal and Ancient game is perceived in China at this stage of the country's opening up.
Golf is fast becoming established in the Middle Kingdom, with 80 courses built across the country in the last decade, but in the popular imagination any officials who play golf are on the take because it is so expensive. Green fees on the course by the Great Wall are £65 on weekdays, plus £35 for the hire of clubs, a sum equivalent to two weeks' pay for a white-collar worker.
Indeed the central leadership is so concerned about giving scandal that in June the Communist Party discipline commission quietly imposed a ban on party and government officials playing golf. A commission bureaucrat was quoted as saying: "No official can afford to play golf at their own expense, so it's easy to conclude that there must be something wrong when golf courses are crowded with party and government officials."
The ban is more honoured in the breach than the observance, and a number of retired senior Chinese officials have acquired respectable handicaps, including Zhao Ziyang, who was party general secretary until the 1989 Tiananmen Square crackdown and has now, quite literally, been put out to grass.
And, perhaps in preparation for his own retirement in 2003, China's President Jiang Zemin has also reportedly taken up golf, practising on a small course in the sprawling Zhongnanhai compound in Beijing.
The game still however has few native players, just 20,000 out of 1.3 billion people, according to Cui Zhiqiang, secretary general of the Beijing-based China Golf Association (compared to 170,000 male and female club members in the Republic of Ireland). Golf is being established in China as the preserve of the elite, unlike Ireland and other European countries where it began on public courses and only later extended to country clubs.
Imposing the game at this late stage also means appropriating scarce arable land, and the intrusion of manicured fairways into farming areas has stirred resentments. In June, when land on the Beijing outskirts was rented out to Sanhuangshan (Three Yellow Mountain) Tourism Board to build a golf course, the peasants who farmed it found out only when bulldozers arrived to clear away their apple trees. Dozens of elderly women were detained for standing defiantly in front of bulldozers and a local farmer who took photographs was taken from his home at midnight and held for 36 hours for "disturbing social order".
It is ironic that in communist countries, where the interests of the masses are supposed to be paramount, that there should be such scenes; in Vietnam a villager was killed during the mid-1990s in fights with police to stop farmland outside Hanoi being annexed for a golf course.
But golf has become as much a part of relentless globalism as computers and mobile phones, and no country which opens up can resist being colonised by 18-hole courses. Mr Cui is aware of how the game has become an important lubricant in modern business dealings, and he once described it to a reporter as "an opportunity for us to open the doors of China to the world and show the world how China is".
But he is realistic, acknowledging that while a lot of Chinese people know the objective is to hit a ball into a hole, "the average person doesn't think golf's a game for him".
The "foreignness" of golf is borne out by the fact that China is still one of the few countries in the world where the name Tiger Woods is relatively unknown. I established this by doing my own poll; i.e., I asked a very well-connected yuppie Chinese friend, who said, "Run that name by me again?" Maybe Tiger, if he ever wants a quiet game, should play a round on the course by the Great Wall. It is one of the few places on the planet where he would not be mobbed by the locals, and the village caddies could always tell him what club to take.