The story of southeast Asia's two 'best courses'

Beijing: To play the two best golf courses in China, you'll first need to fly into Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, which shares borders with Myanmar, Tibet, Vietnam and Thailand.

Then you'll need to hire a driver to take you about 90 minutes outside of Kunming. The drive will take you through small villages along a pristine new highway that winds through the Stone Forest, a Unesco World Heritage site and Kunming's top tourist attraction.

When you arrive at Spring City Golf and Lake Resort, you'll be treated to the beautiful sloping fairways and meticulously maintained greens of Spring City's Mountain Course and Lake Course.

The pair have racked up awards in their nine years of existence and just last week were ranked first and second in Golf Digest's Top 10 Chinese Courses. Closer to Kunming city proper, Lakeview Golf Resort is no slouch either - it made the Golf Digest list at number six.

Kunming is one of two cities that has hosted China's pro golf circuit, the Omega China Tour, every year since its inception in 2005.

New complex

And before the end of the year, the city will be home to China's first miniature golf complex, a trend that has a real chance of catching on in China.

How did Kunming - not the coastal metropolises of Shanghai and Beijing, not Shenzhen, the home of Mission Hills, which boasts 12 designer courses - become the destination of choice for golfers who want to play China's best?

The city's year-round temperate weather and relatively clean air help.

And as with any major development project in China, there is surely an untold backstory of political manoeuvring that allowed Spring City and Lakeview to get funded and built.

Course builder

But also essential was the vision and determination of Arthur Yeo, now Spring City's general manager.

When Yeo was hired to build a golf course in Kunming in 1994, he knew he had to shoot the moon.

"The only way to make it work was that right away, my target wasn't China, because there were no golfers here," said Yeo.

"We had to target southeast Asia, and to do that we had to have the best course in Asia."

Yeo was so adamant about this that he says he had it written into the contracts of course designers Jack Nicklaus and Robert Trent Jones Jr.

And instead of following standard procedure and working with a team of designers, he pored over resumes himself and picked out one person from each company.

"I wanted their best guys, and I wanted them to be completely accountable for the project," Yeo said. "When I needed talk to someone, I wanted one guy to be responsible for taking my call."

But operating a golf resort isn't all bunkers and fairways.

Whether golf grows significantly in China remains to be seen, but one thing has already been decided: the road to golf's success runs through Kunming.

The way to make the course an immediate success was not through Chinese golfers as there wasn't any. It was to make the course the best in southeast Asia.