Earlier today I sat down with a golfer who has been playing the game for more than sixty years. His last round in Kunming was twenty years ago — right at the beginning of the city's golf boom, and only a few years after our first course here, Kunming Country Club, opened in 1997.

He arrived with a list in his head: the lakeside layouts, the mountain courses, the clubs he played with friends back then. Much of it, I had to tell him, is no longer playable.

The gap is easy to explain and hard to accept: over the past decade the golf landscape in Yunnan has been reshaped. Courses that were part of the game's early years here have closed, and what a player remembers from twenty years ago no longer matches what is actually on the ground today. It is not a failing memory — the map itself has changed

That is what this page is for: one current, honest list of the courses in Yunnan — in the order I would recommend them, with a rating and today's status for each. If you are planning a return trip, start here.

Yunnan is still one of the most rewarding golf destinations in Asia — highland air, mountain backdrops and courses that sit at altitude, where the ball travels noticeably further. What has changed is the list of clubs you can actually play.

To save you a wasted trip, the full Yunnan list is set out below in one table — ordered by local and oversea golfer recommendation, best first, with a rating for each course and its current status. Only the courses marked OPEN appear in my itineraries and quotations.

The list, ranked

★ ratings are my own, based on layout, conditioning and the experience you get for the price. Courses marked CLOSED are permanently out of play.