So after the obligatory tour of the Beijing sights-the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, the Forbidden City-I got down to business with a three-hour flight to the city of Shenzhen, at the southern tip of China, and a visit to the Mission Hills Resort.

 A few hundred yards after we passed through the guarded gate, my jaw dropped. In front of us was a hole with a group of four golfers and their caddies on the tee and another group putting out. Hardly remarkable, except that it was 10 minutes past midnight. At Mission Hills, golf is played under floodlights until 2 a.m.

 Indeed, at this place everything is done in a big way. Mission Hills is the brainchild of David Chu, a Hong Kong businessman who made a fortune in corrugated paper. In 1992 Chu had a vision of building the largest golf resort in the world. Thirteen years and nearly half a billion dollars later, he reached his goal with the completion of Mission Hills' ninth and 10th courses, two more than Pinehurst.

 Yes, 180 holes of golf, serviced from a pro shop the size of the Astrodome and staffed by an army of 2,400 female caddies in red uniforms with enormous white bonnets. The first course at Mission Hills was a Jack Nicklaus design that opened in 1994, joined in short order by designs from Ernie Els, Nick Faldo,

Jumbo Ozaki and Vijay Singh (or at least they lent their signatures and cut the opening-day ribbons). Then in 2002 Chu doubled his leisure with five more courses, by David Duval, David Leadbetter, Greg Norman, Jose Maria Olazabal and Annika Sorenstam, on a more rugged and dramatic tract of land a few miles away. Astonishingly, all five were constructed simultaneously over 18 months, thanks to a force of 30,000 laborers working around the clock.

On the 1st tee of the Norman course, one of my fellow players, a young teaching pro at Mission Hills, gave me the ominous news that Greg had agreed to the job only on the condition that his would be the most difficult course of the 10. From the back tees it is 7,200 yards, with the front nine climbing and dipping precipitously along a series of ridges and hills, and the back winding through a tropical forest that could have been the backdrop for King Kong.