Australian golf great Greg Norman shocked people back home when word spread in May that his golf-course design business had closed its Sydney office and opened a new sales-and-marketing office in Beijing. "Everyone in the golf world knows that China is the place to be," says golf coach Hank Haney, who spent years tweaking Tiger Woods' swing. "Golf is growing and growing here, and there is no reason to think it will stop." Haney was in Beijing in June to announce plans for his first golf academy in China.

Like so much else in China, it all happened in the blink of an eye. Long seen as a bourgeois sport, golf was banned, in effect, after the Communist Party took power in 1949. Now China has 400 courses, virtually all of them built in the last decade and a half. Much of the credit for this golfing boom goes to a former Hong Kong paper-and-packaging tycoon named David Chu.

David Chu (Chu Shu-ho)

Chu is the founder and chairman of Mission Hills in Shenzhen, the world's largest golf club, according to Guinness World Records. It sprawls over 20 square kilometers of lakes and manicured lawn, and boasts not only 12 courses but also 51 tennis courts in a surreal stretch of nets that ranks as Asia's largest tennis center. It was a big bet when it opened in 1994, but it broke into the black 18 months later and has been immensely profitable for most of the past decade, according to officials at the privately held Mission Hills Group. Chu's total investment in Shenzhen has grown to $1.5 billion, but villas along the courses sell at prices that top $25 million, and a membership can cost $265,000.

Now the 60-year-old Chu is taking a far bigger risk. His company says it's pumping $4.4 billion into what could be a supersize version of Mission Hills on the southern Chinese resort island of Hainan, near the capital, Haikou. That money is being spent on ten courses and elaborate facilities: a 518-room hotel that opened in March, a water park with a mineral springs theme, a lagoon-style pool and so on. Three courses are open and the others should be ready in five years. But there are expected to be 20 or more courses eventually, say local government officials, all built atop an ancient lava field; the cone of a volcano is visible from parts of the complex. "In terms of scale and facilities, Mission Hills Haikou will be our biggest resort," says Chu, "bigger than Shenzhen."

The company is tight-lipped about how it's funding this massive project, declining to name any of the other investors or say whether any funds are borrowed. A statement from the company says only that $880 million has been spent so far and that "investors include entrepreneurs and professionals from different industries from China and Hong Kong." It also won't disclose its annual revenue and profit.

But the company doesn't mind talking about next month's Mission Hills Star Trophy Pro-Am. It will be the first tournament at Mission Hills Haikou and the winner-take-all prize will be biggest individual purse ever offered at a golf tournament in China--$1.3 million. Movie stars such as Hugh Grant, Michael Douglas and Christian Slater have signed on for the Oct. 28--31 event, as well as top pros Ryuji Imada, Zhang Liangwei, Colin Montgomerie and Norman. Leading the field of women players is Se Ri Pak.

Meanwhile, away from the tournament site, scores of tractors and cranes are working on a desolate expanse of spindly shrubs and black rock. At their peak, 15,000 workers and 3,000 vehicles struggled to transform the lava field into a country club. An entire hill was leveled for soil. "There was a string of trucks moving one after another all the way to the horizon," recalls Brian Curley, who designed the first ten courses and is giving a tour by golf cart. Some 50,000 trees have been planted.

Ken Chu, David Chu's oldest son

Chu's oldest son, Ken, runs the day-to-day operations of the family golf empire. He's described as "the doer," a confident decision maker with an uncanny command of the business, right down to details such as the number and types of plants added to the Haikou courses. The 36-year-old is all too aware of the engineering task he faces. "Shenzhen was swampland when we started and a huge challenge," he says. "But this is much bigger. It's like the center of the earth, a 10,000-year-old lava bed. There's no soil, hardly any vegetation. It's much worse than jungle because you can carve a course from jungle. In Hainan we blasted into rock to put in soil for the vegetation."

The signature courses, with meadows for crowds and tv coverage, will get the most attention. But several short, all-par-three courses will appeal to beginners as well as duffers on a deadline. Curley shows off a series of ditches that will become an enormous water park around the hotel, featuring a volcano theme. There will also be a spa-themed park, with a range of pools and therapies.

David Chu Shu-ho may be the unlikeliest driving force that a sport has ever seen. He didn't know anything about golf when he bought a house in Toronto on a fairway in the early 1980s. He has six children, and like many parents, he saw investment potential in buying a place for them to stay while they were away at school. "We had to explain to him what all those little balls in the backyard were," jokes Tenniel, the second oldest of Chu's three sons, who also works in the business.

David Chu has always kept a low profile, despite building what family members say was once the largest paper-and-packaging business in Hong Kong and China. In fact scant mention is made of this time in his official Mission Hills biography, but he was perfecting his skill at the Chinese game of guanxi, or connections. This would not only boost his career but also account for so much of the success of golf in China as another avenue for networking. He founded the Shun Feng Corrugated Carton Factory in 1974 and began operations in Guangdong Province in 1978, the year Deng Xiaoping announced his reforms. This company is long gone, but Chu's empire includes two Hong Kong-listed companies related to construction and real estate-management, and four hotels in the Atlanta area in the U.S.--three Hiltons and a Marriott. He's also developed a condominium project in downtown Atlanta.

Chu has never played much golf, but in the early 1990s he began pushing his ambitious plan for a golf resort in Shenzhen. "I saw that golf was played all over the world but not yet in China," he says. "I knew it was good for networking. Our site [in Shenzhen] was a great location--within a two-hour drive there were 150 million people."

With land so expensive, Hong Kong has never had many courses, so he reckoned that the city's tycoons would eagerly cross the border to play a top course, each designed by a golf legend. "Even his friends thought he was crazy," says Ken Chu. "But he had this idea like a fever, even when friends told him it was like throwing money into the sea."

David Chu bought land in a garbage dump to recycle into a plush country club. Giant billboards now extol million-dollar villas in neighborhoods with names such as Rosedale, Emerald Canyon and Belgravia. But Ken Chu remembers his first sight of the desolate patch between Shenzhen and Dongguan: a billboard proclaiming "Dog Restaurant."

Work was slow, and there were numerous setbacks. Early investors pulled out, leaving David Chu perpetually short of cash. "At the start we had maybe 100 golfers a month," he says. "It was very difficult, but my motto has always been 'No regrets and never quit.'" When the business started to pick up, "then we had the [1997--98] Asian financial crisis."

In 2002 Mission Hills became entangled in a scandal when one of its investors was murdered amid a suit against the company. A single shot to the head killed Harry Lam Hon-lit after he sat down to his usual breakfast at the Luk Yu Teahouse on Stanley ( SXE - news - people ) Street in Central. The killing occurred as a court was due to hear his lawsuit to halt work and sales at Mission Hills over a dispute on the value of his shares. He held rights equivalent to a 3% stake in the project, according to reports, and said this entitled him to sell memberships.

The case received widespread publicity in a city fascinated by gangland disputes. The killers fled to China, where they were arrested. Eventually the web of intrigue spread from the killers, who reports said were former People's Liberation Army soldiers, to a network of paymasters hired by Yeung Ka-on, a kung fu actor turned businessman. Six people were convicted in 2006, including Yeung, but no motive or link to the victim was established.

Mission Hills Shenzhen started getting serious notice outside China in 1995, when Chu lured the World Cup of Golf final; it's now a fixture in China and will move from Shenzhen to Hainan next year. It was not only the first major international golf tournament for China, but also the first to be widely televised, and it helped spark the golf boom. Six years later he scored a coup when he brought Tiger Woods to the country for the first time.

Chu, who played table tennis and badminton growing up in Hong Kong, was a leader in the effort to bring the Summer Olympics to Beijing, and that surely helped keep the authorities onside as he developed his golf business. He swung into action in the 1990s, when Beijing was courting the 2000 Games. China had little experience with global sporting events, and Chu's fledgling Mission Hills represented a showcase for the mainland's ability to muster world-class facilities. Then for the 2008 Olympics there was Team Chu, a full-time lobbying effort of roughly a dozen consultants and others.

Now China's sports spotlight will focus on Hainan. "After 20 years I'm proudest that now there are 5 million Chinese golf lovers and the number is growing all the time," says Chu. "If I could turn back the clock, I'd gladly do it all the same again."