To this end, members would have to reapply to join, paying £100,000 (US$140,000) for a debenture – in essence loaning the money to Reignwood and its owner, a Thai-Chinese billionaire named Yan Bin, for a term of 50 years. Members would also have to fork out higher annual dues: £10,000 for an individual or £16,000 for a family, where previously a family had paid about £8,000.

Even if all the members could afford this – a remote possibility, since the club was home not just to multimillionaires and CEOs, but also estate agents and dentists – not everyone would get back in. To make things exclusive, Yan wanted to issue just 888 debentures. The number may be lucky in China, but not so much at Wentworth, since three-quarters of the members stood to lose their memberships altogether.

“There were ructions,” one attender tells me. “People were very upset.” One member, Stanley Simmons, now in his 80s and once Queen Elizabeth’s physician, protested. He had been at Wentworth for more than 50 years, he said, and he recognised that he did not have many rounds left to play. Why would he spend a fresh £100,000? Gibson’s response, another member recalled, was: “Don’t worry, Sir Stanley, you can bequeath it.”

When Fleming rose to speak, he struck a defiant note: “Some of you will need to fasten your seat belts.” Yan really needed to improve the greens, he said, instead of launching doomed ideas like the debenture. The cull of members would destroy Wentworth’s traditions, Fleming warned. “It would be a shame for our new owners not to be considered honourable.” As he wound down, though, he sounded doleful, as if already lamenting a bygone era. “At least we will be able to say we were here in the good times.”

Since its founding, in 1922, the golf club has been the nucleus of Wentworth Estate, a private community of villas, which occupies 700 hectares. About 500 of its houses sit on public roads. The other 300-plus, bigger and more expensive still, are located on private roads that snake through the golf club and wrap tightly around it. These residents call their part of the estate “The Island”.

If you are a newcomer, it is not always easy to know when you are on a golf course and when you are not. The lands of The Island and the club run in and out of each other, like a zip’s interlocking teeth. Wayward balls come to earth in the gardens of houses. A few of the roads intersect fairways, and their verges are putting-green grassy. Some of the homes are so luxurious that they might be mistaken for small clubhouses. This is Virginia Water, after all – the first British town outside London where the average sale price of a house hit £1 million, back in 2013.

There is no mistaking the actual clubhouse once you come upon it: a long, low structure with crenellated walls and turrets over the door. It looks well-prepared for a lengthy siege against insurrectionist caddies. To golfers everywhere, Wentworth is the birthplace of the Ryder Cup, the home of the BMW PGA Championship and one of the world’s most prestigious courses. To the golfers on The Island, the club is why they live where they live. Nigel Moss, a management consultant who is a member and a resident of The Island, tells me: “It’s our hub, it’s our pub, it’s our church, it’s our community centre.”

The reforms threatened to evict most of the occu­pants from this hallowed space, pushing the club past the reach of the merely rich and towards the outrageously wealthy – the sort of people who can whip out a spare hundred thousand for a golf membership. A coalition of members, including Fleming and Moss, embarked on an energetic PR campaign, saying Wentworth would be destroyed, and neither Yan nor Gibson understood its culture or history.

The press ate it up, spotting in this rift between what one headline called the “well-to-do” and the “stinking rich” an opportunity for the mocking weep of tiny violins. Several reports quoted Parkinson, a man not short of money, grumbling that Yan just wanted “a car park full of Lamborghinis”. One Times report on the argument sat next to a piece headlined: “Billionaire wins legal fight over £15m yacht that was too small.”

The ongoing clash between Yan and his club’s members has witnessed several dramatic phases: threats, lawsuits, duplicity, negotiations, truces, even death. But the tale is not just about the prepos­terousness of the wealthy. Rather, it is impossible to learn about all this turmoil – in a place called “The Island”, for crying out loud – and not see it as an allegory.

With its groves of pine and rhododendrons, its houses named Heatherbrook or Bluebell Wood or Silver Birches, and the gentle hillocks of its club’s fairways, Wentworth Estate holds dear a vision of pastoral Englishness. But since the 1980s, Wentworth has been reshaped – just like England itself – by money. First by the wealth of the home-grown 1 per cent, which considered itself immune to the turmoil of change, but then it found itself subject to the whims of the globalised capital held by the 0.001 per cent like Yan.

Fleming joined the club so long ago that he cannot remember the exact year: 1984 or 1985, he thinks. Unable to afford a house on Wentworth Estate, he and his wife found one in the village of Sunningdale – still pretty affluent, all things considered, and a close enough drive that Fleming could start lacing up his shoes in his kitchen and be on the first tee seven minutes later.

Wentworth is a magnet for devoted golfers. It was in its Burma Bar, after a friendly between American and British golfers in 1926, that the garden-seed magnate Samuel Ryder proposed repeating the fixture regularly – the germination of the Ryder Cup. The club hosts the European Tour’s PGA Championship every May. Jack Nicklaus, Sam Snead and Nick Faldo have played here. Ernie Els, once the world’s top-ranked golfer, tells me he still remembers “the sound of the shots echoing in among the trees” from his first game at the club. He loved Wentworth so much he bought a house nearby.

When Fleming joined, Wentworth had two 18-hole courses, the East and the West. A third, the Edinburgh, was added in 1990. These are difficult courses, Fleming says – courses for serious golf. “You’d hate the game if you started learning here. It’d be like getting into a Formula One car before ever driving anything else.”

A round of golf requires such a luxurious surplus of space and time that it can never have been called an ordinary person’s game. By the 1980s, golf clubs had long gained their reputation as being sanctuaries for the corporate wealthy – places where these executives not only spent their money but colluded to make more of it. Still, Fleming insists that Wentworth in those days was not just for rich people. “No one asked what you did for a living. I couldn’t even say how many of the people I played with had been to university.” Back then, he paid close to £1,000 a year in fees – in today’s money, less than £3,000. No one cared how good the food was, or even ate dinner there. It was golf and little else.

By and by, that changed. More golf courses opened up in the green belt around London, as farmers sold their land, and new retirees and the Thatcherite wealthy took up hobbies. Chelsfield, the property development firm that owned the biggest stake in Wentworth, spruced up the club: tennis courts, an indoor pool, a new driving range. When Chelsfield sold Wentworth in 2005, British clothing tycoon Richard Caring paid £130 million for it. Caring had outbid, among others, the Savoy hotels group, and although he loved golf, he itched with mild buyer’s remorse. He wasn’t very good at auctions, he told the Financial Times. He suspected he had ended up paying 50 per cent more than the club was worth.

Caring invested heavily. He improved the club’s food and service. He hired Els to lead a £6.5 million renovation of the West Course – to design new bunkers, to tonsure the putting greens and plant them with a different kind of grass. The project took 13 years. “It needed to be done,” Els says. “I mean, the course had barely been touched in 80-something years.”

But the members always felt Caring had one eye cocked for buyers, so he could earn his money back quickly. The fees rose beyond “the average person’s comfort zone”, Fleming says. (Although, of course, most golf club fees have never fallen within the average person’s comfort zone.) The membership increasingly comprised young bankers and lawyers who drove in from London for the rare game.

Caring even wanted to build a hotel around the club, to drive up its value, another member says, but his move to get planning permission was stymied by Wentworth Estate’s homeowners. Finally, in 2014, Caring sold the club to Reignwood for £135 million – a slender profit. Which was how Wentworth Estate became home to Yan, who blew into the club’s snug, staid world and turned it upside down.

The row between members of Wentworth golf club and Chinese owners

A Chinese conglomerate’s entry into Wentworth Estate was novel, but it was not like Wentworth had not seen money before. Yan is only the latest, and among the richest, of a long line of well-heeled arrivals. Beginning in the 1980s, The Island attracted people with a high order of wealth – all of whom have found, over the past decade or so, that they, in turn, are being inconveniently supplanted by people with an altogether more stratospheric order of wealth. Former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet lived there from 1998 to 2000, under house arrest in a bungalow called Everglades. His supporters rented it for £10,000 a month.

More foreign buyers arrived in the 2000s: Middle Eastern royals; Russians such as Pyotr Aven, who heads one of his country’s largest banks; the kings of three Malaysian provinces. They are rarely seen, using their residences only for a month or two a year. The houses got bigger and plusher, until they resembled hotels.

After Yan bought the club, he also bought a house in Wentworth through a holding company: a 900-square-metre mansion named Robinswood. Its previous owner, a Russian gas tycoon, had put it on the market for £18 million. It was not a stretch for Yan to think that, to be maximally profitable, his club should forget about the dentists on its rolls and target the exorbitantly wealthy like himself. After all, there were enough of them right here on The Island. Justifying the debenture, Gibson asked one reporter: “Did you get a look at any of the houses when you drove in this morning?”

The Island changed, in other words, just as Britain did. The country, too, became a domicile for people who had made fortunes elsewhere. They found that Britain called to them with open arms and lax tax regimes, even as its politicians were erecting barriers for immigrants of more modest means. The plutocratic few arrived to buy property in central London, Scottish estates, football clubs or newspapers.

In escalating fees, Yan was looking for a new kind of member, which left the old kind of member out in the cold. Moss described it to me as a “culture clash. He made no attempt to understand the club. He thought he could do what he wanted, basically”.

But the golfers could still resist, so Moss and some others formed their coalition, calling it “Wet Feet”, after a Chinese proverb: “It never rains on your neighbours without you getting your feet wet.” They set about learning more about Yan and parleying with his representatives. “It makes me question,” Moss says, “what would have happened if we hadn’t stepped up.”

For a group of jilted golfers in Surrey, Yan was a remote, formidable adversary. Reignwood, his Hong Kong-based holding company, has numerous interests – golf, aviation, finance, petrochemicals – but he made most of his money selling energy drinks. This he did, in the style of most billionaires, through a combination of political muscle and scrappy street-fighting – and, his critics claim, a hazy sense of ethics. I tried contacting him, but a Reignwood executive refused all interviews. Gibson, the former CEO, said he had been unwell and declined to comment, as did Neil Coulson, the club’s current general manager.

Born in 1954, in the Chinese coastal province of Shandong, Yan emigrated to Thailand in the 1980s and, after fighting through a few years of poverty, set up the company that became Reignwood. Six years later, he returned home with money, an alternate Thai name – Chanchai Ruayrungruang – and contacts. In 1995, he set up a joint venture with a Thai firm called the TCP Group to manufacture and sell the energy drink Red Bull in China.

The recipe for Red Bull is the property of the TCP Group, which licenses others to make and market the drink outside Thailand, earning royalties and dividends from the sales. The drink is calibrated to local tastes: fizzier in some countries, flatter and more medicinal elsewhere. In most parts of the world, the licensee is Red Bull GmbH, an Austrian company, which designed the drink’s blue-and-silver can. In China, Yan’s genius lay in positioning Red Bull as a premium product, selling it in a heavy, gold-coloured can and pricing it at six to eight yuan, twice the cost of a can of Coke.

His success was spectacular. “In China, pregnant women at hospitals are sometimes given Red Bull to stimulate labour,” a well-placed source in the energy drinks industry says. “Children drink Red Bull before exams.” In 2019, Red Bull earned Reignwood US$3.1 billion in revenue. Estimates of Yan’s wealth vary wildly: the Bloomberg Billionaires Index pegged it at US$2.9 billion in 2019 while the Hurun Report’s annual China Rich List put it last year at US$16.2 billion.

Around the turn of the century, Yan built his first golf club, Pine Valley: 54 holes designed by Nicklaus, set within a 2,500-hectare resort near Beijing, a property so lavish, it is as if its owner had demanded something like Versailles, only grander. Its membership once cost as much as US$300,000, a former Reignwood manager says, adding that Yan sees golf as a networking opportunity: “He likes to make friends with government officials and celebrities.”

Along the way, Yan cultivated a close relationship with the Communist Party. Reignwood promotes Chinese foreign policy by hosting forums on Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative. He belongs to the National Committee of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, a body that advises the party. These connections have often insulated him from political interference. Even as the government cracked down on golf over the past decade, calling it a corrupt and decadent game and shutting down courses all over the country, Pine Valley has thrived.

Wentworth popped up on Yan’s shopping list when he began roving overseas, looking for things to buy. At one point, close to 90 per cent of Reignwood’s cash flow came from Red Bull, so diversification seemed essential. One of Reignwood’s first major purchases overseas was of a luxury apartment complex in Singapore in 2013, for an estimated US$400 million. (Each flat above the ground floor has a “sky garage”, so residents can turntable their cars up and park them next to their living rooms.)

The same year, Reignwood bought the Corn Exchange building in London, an 18th century grain market now occupied by offices. Next, in addition to Wentworth, Reignwood snapped up the Port of London Authority’s old headquarters and spent nearly £500 million turning it into a luxury hotel.

Until about a decade ago, “it was largely Chinese state-owned enterprises doing the investing abroad”, says Sarah Hall, a professor at the University of Nottingham, who studies the flows of financial globalisation. Mostly, these funds poured into sectors such as energy or mining. Then Chinese magnates started to spend. In Britain, they followed the groove traversed first by Middle Eastern investors and then Russian ones, buying commercial real estate, technology and financial services. They paid special attention to brands that came with prestige or popular renown: the Greene King pub chain, Wolverhampton Wanderers football club, Loch Lomond Distillers.

‘Not in my backyard’: China’s controversial new embassy in London

In 2018, in the most emphatic such example, China’s government bought the Royal Mint Court, opposite the Tower of London, and announced it would move its embassy into these premises. Yan’s interest in the historic sites of the Corn Exchange and the Port of London Authority fit this pattern neatly – as did his purchase of Wentworth.

It is tempting to read into these acquisitions China’s desire to stamp its new primacy on the old bastions of Western power. Certainly there is some symbolism in China situating its new embassy within the very building that once received the shipments of silver China was forced to pay Britain at the end of the opium wars. Or, for that matter, in Yan’s reported desire to clone Wentworth back east. These developments often send some sections of the polity and media into a froth.

But China and the Chinese super-wealthy are merely implementing with particular alacrity the beliefs of other great powers of the recent past: that capital must be unimpeded, that it cares little for history or sentiment. It just so happens that, in this century, there is money to be made not just from oil or ore, but also from the very institutions set up by those making the money in a time gone by.

After Wentworth announced its fee rise, in 2015, Wet Feet hired lawyers to draft a letter to the club. The letter argued that the club was breaking the contractual rights of members and its covenant with Wentworth Estate, whose residents were always entitled to be members if they wished. “I’m not saying these issues weren’t absolutely valid,” Moss says. “But we knew we would never win. It might have taken years and hundreds of thousands of pounds to take it all the way through the courts, by which time there would have been an exodus of members from the club and Yan Bin would have outspent us.”

Better to protest, they reasoned, by loudly occupying the moral high ground. With the help of a PR firm – not a resource usually available to agitators – Wet Feet fed newspapers details of their protest. Fleming, wearing his club blazer, went to the Chinese embassy to deliver a petition against Reignwood. (“We nearly got arrested going in. But we delivered it OK. The door opened just this much” – between a thumb and a finger – “and they took the letter.” There was no response.)

Wet Feet roped in Philip Hammond, their local MP and Britain’s foreign secretary at the time, who promised to seek a meeting with Yan and intervene. (Hammond did meet one of Reignwood’s vice-presidents, Ni Songhua, a couple of times, Moss says.) A spot of Gandhian civil disobedience was threatened. “We can, in practice, make it very difficult to hold an event like the PGA,” a resident told the BBC. “There are obviously a lot of people who are prepared to block the road if required.”

The truce came in March 2016. Through Ni, Reignwood accepted some compromises. Existing members could continue on an annual fee, although higher than the one they had been paying. Or they could put down a £20,000 advance on an £85,000 debenture, hand over the remainder after three years, and pay a lower annual fee. New members, though, had to buy a fresh debenture for £125,000 – a figure that has since ballooned to £150,000.

Fleming decided he could not afford Wentworth any more and joined West Hill Golf Club nearby, paying around £2,400 annually. “I couldn’t see Wentworth being the same as it was,” he says. “You felt as if the heart of the club was being destroyed. I didn’t want to be around to see that happening.”

One of Wet Feet’s most vociferous members, though, opted for the debenture, and Wet Feet itself was dissolved. After all the energy they had expended, why did he decide to pay up?

He shrugs. They were conscious, he says, that if they dragged out their campaign, they would eventually lose any public sympathy they had – that they would be seen as a chorus of privileged grumblers. And he lived on the estate, he says. Where else was he going to play golf? “I look at it as a lifestyle choice […] It would be like cutting my nose to spite my face to not accept the concessions.”

Wentworth’s Chinese owners say members threaten UK’s investment reputations

We are talking in his house, and I wonder if there are others like him, members who could afford the debenture but who had just balked at being asked abruptly to pay it by a faceless Chinese corporation. But I do not have time to complete that thought; he has promised to show me the club, so we drive there in his car. It’s December and pouring, and although a lockdown has just ended, several Covid-19 rules are still in force – the worst way to explore Wentworth. (The club has taken hundreds of thousands of pounds of taxpayer funds to furlough its staff in the pandemic.)

We amble, masked, through the clubhouse. I see the Burma Bar, which Reignwood has renovated, turning it from an old-school 19th hole into an anodyne place that belongs, as members joke, “in a premiere Premier Inn”. Reignwood has also done away with the ancient wooden honours’ boards lining the walls and corridors; after an outcry, it commissioned replacements, which look new and – there is no other way to say this – cheap. Ironic, given the price of the debenture, I remark. My guide smiles grimly.

After the truce, the turbulence at Wentworth subsided, but only slightly. Reignwood made some improvements to the club, the Wet Feet-ers granted – chief among them the installation of a vast under­ground ventilation system that dries out the fairways. It also seemed, for a while, as if Reignwood was preoccupied with other matters – not just Red Bull litigation in China, but even problems in Britain. In 2017, Reignwood dismissed Ni, who promptly sued, claiming he had been denied his promised share in Yan’s European ventures. Reignwood sued Ni in turn, alleging, among other things, that he had “refused to provide an account of his stewardship” of 32,000 bottles of wine, worth around £4.8 million. Before any of this could be resolved, Ni died.

Then, two years ago, Gibson was forced out of his position. After he found out he had been replaced by Yan’s daughter, Gibson, a white man, sued Wentworth for racial discrimination, claiming £750,000 in damages. Last November, Gibson confirmed to me that he had “an important legal hearing” coming up but refused to say any more.

Despite these hiccups, it is hard to not conclude that Yan, in striking his deal with Wet Feet, has outfoxed them. For one, he killed the barrage of bad press. His debenture is still in place, and people have purchased it – the sort who can afford to pay £150,000. With the older members, he can keep raising the yearly fee, according to his needs, and he has done: from £10,000 for an individual in 2017 to £13,000 now.

And he will have good reason to do that. He has a loan to finance, and Wentworth is leaking money: a loss on ordinary activities after tax of £16 million in 2018, and of £9 million in 2019. A recent circular warned those without debentures of a fee rise around the corner, in 2022. As long as he can hold on to the club, and is interested in it, Yan can make it what he wants it to be. He is still, when all is said and done, enormously wealthy. His wealth affords him patience, so he has merely deferred his win. But the win will come, the member of the erstwhile Wet Feet says. “There’s no question about it. The writing is on the wall.”

Text: Guardian News & Media