The rise of golf in Vietnam

After the Vietnam War, golf – considered imperialistic and bourgeois – was all but banished from Vietnam’s sporting activities. But the emergence of foreign investment has seen the sport stage a comeback.

The French were the first to import golf back in the 1920s but the handful of small courses and lack of interest from the Vietnamese elite meant the sport didn’t take off. When the Americans arrived a few decades later they used Emperor Bao Dai’s defunct course in Da Lat, further giving golf the tarnish of imperialism.  

But since the collapse of the Soviet Union and Vietnam’s warming to international commerce, golfing tours have become big business. The arrival of the foreign businessman has not only seen a demand for luxury hotels, but luxury links too. Old courses have reopened and new ones have been built.

One of Vietnam’s best loved and oldest clubs is the Dalat Palace Golf Club, which reopened in 1994. The north of the country saw its first club – Kings’ Island Golf Club – open in 1993. Today more than a dozen links welcome tourists, with plenty more in the pipeline.