Yang Tze Dunes
Asia’s First True Links Track Rewards Imagination With Success
Yangtze Dunes, the recently renovated 18 at the 36-hole Lanhai International Country Club, celebrated its grand re-opening late last year with a lavish, weeklong ceremony that drew a throng of local dignitaries and an international assembly of media, course raters and tour players.
The re-opening followed a sweeping renovation from the Melbourne-based course architects at Ogilvy, Clayton, Cocking & Mead (OCCM), who produced what many are hailing as the first proper links track on the Asian mainland. The renovated 18 re-opened as a walking-only course, another rarity here in Shanghai, one that necessitated the removal of some 8 km of concrete cart paths.
Several tour pros walked or played the course after the WGC-HSBC Champions event across town. They made the trek at the behest of 2006 U.S. Open champion Geoff Ogilvy, who is also a partner in OCCM.
“While certainly long enough to test the best tour players in the world, the real interest at Yangtze Dunes lies in the strategy of the holes and the great variety of shots required to score well,” said Ogilvy, who praised the club’s maintenance team for achieving firm-andfast conditions so soon after opening. “While length is certainly rewarded here, success will come only to those with the imagination to find the best way around, avoiding the worst of the hazards and leaving the best angles.
“Modern courses, from a professional perspective, can get one dimensional, rewarding power over all else. Lanhai is a test with more far more nuance.”
Ogilvy’s partner in the OCCM, Ashley Mead, directed the Yangtze Dunes renovation on the ground. Both agree the traditional, treeless, flamboyantly contoured, scrub-strewn design at Yangtze Dunes ably showcases a design style that remains an outlier across much of the region.
“The mere fact that we’ve created a true links track at Yangtze Dunes makes it stand out from nearly every golf course that currently exists in Asia,” Mead said. “For whatever reason, cultural or climatic, Asian developers have not chosen to build many courses in the links tradition.
“As a firm, we’re deeply committed to designing golf courses that represent the local environment. And here’s a relevant fact: Chongming is the largest alluvial island in the world, alluvial being a fancy way of describing sand islands formed by river currents. So, we’re in China, on a giant sand bar in the middle of the mighty Yangtze River, just northeast of Shanghai, in the shadow of the towering Yangtze River Bridge. This site was crying out for a full-on links and we’re very pleased Yangtze Dunes so strongly accentuates this place and culture.”
Founded in 2009, Lanhai International CC quickly took its place among the top clubs in Asia on the strength of its 36 holes (including the Nicklaus Designed Woodlands Course), its elegant Tuscanstyle clubhouse, and a distinguished membership drawn from nearby Shanghai.
It was in late 2016 that the new ownership under the Ping An Group altered club fortunes by commissioning OCCM to create a golfing experience that would compete with the world’s best. In another move that signaled its pursuit of a global
profile, Lanhai International CC recently named Joey Garon the club’s Executive Secretary in charge of operations. Garon previously served as general manager of Shanqin Bay Golf Club from its inception in 2012, which remains the only Chinese course to crack GOLF Magazine’s prestigious World Top 100 list in 2017, which ranked this Coore-crenshaw design #39.
“It’s been a conga line of visitors here since the middle of October. Word of Yangtze Dunes is clearly getting around,” Garon said. “Some may have arrived with a measure of skepticism, but no one left here with any. This is clearly the best course to debut in Asia since 2012. OCCM have produced something marvelous and authentic here, something completely unique to the region.
“The scary thing is, this course is just 10 months old. Strategically, it’s already superb. Aesthetically, its best days are yet to come.”