Opinion | Hong Kong Golf Club has a fascinating past, but future remains cloudy

The past is inescapable at Hong Kong Golf Club, celebrating its 125th anniversary this year, but the present and future weigh on members' minds.

Walking the course at the Hong Kong Open, dragonflies zipping about wide green expanses as the sun dapples through paperbark trees that members planted 100 years ago, you can forget you're in one of the most densely populated cities in the world.

You can see the original members hacking around, hear the hoofbeats of the Fanling Hunt led by William Peel, one of the ex-governor members.

One hundred and 10 graves dot the course - 800 indigenous villagers are allowed to play free to compensate for their ancestors' disrupted repose - and there used to be innumerable jars filled with bones, gradually reduced to smithereens by duffed drives.

Another ex-governor, Henry May, finally paid HK$50,000 in 1920 to compensate villagers to remove these obstructions; you still get a free drop from a grave.

The course was built in 1911 to replace shared facilities founded in 1898 at Happy Valley. To get to the first tee, one used to rickshaw it to the hills above Kowloon, walk to Sha Tin, get a police boat to Tai Po and then a sedan chair, pony or rickshaw.

Current club captain Mark Roberts, a member for more than 40 years, tells us that the course was one of the reasons the Kowloon-Canton Railway was built in the early 20th century. Nothing gets between the golfer and his round.