Breaking News Chinese concede St Andrews is home of golf

Although China insists it invented the ancient game, some of the countries leading golf executives have finally conceded Scotland has the better claim.

Jeffrey Kao, general manager of Lake Malaren, Shanghai's leading private members' club, said: "After seeing the country and playing the historic courses I would say that the home of golf is definitely Scotland and in particular St Andrews."

Another executive agreed: "The Chinese may have hit balls with sticks before they did in Scotland but they didn't have golf courses and they don't have the tradition and history of the game."

Scotland's main claim to being the home of golf lies in reports of play on the links at St Andrews for more than six centuries. The renowned Old Course is one of the world's oldest and is where the modern game was shaped.

A spokesman for the Royal and Ancient Golf Club of St Andrews, the sport's governing body, said Scotland was the first country to "rationalise" the game and apply a set of rules. "Stick and ball games have been around for many centuries in many countries," he said. "But we like to think that the game as we know it today with 18 holes, tees, fairways, greens and a specific target into which a ball is hit was invented in Scotland."

Callum Todd, one of Scotland's leading course designers, said: "The Chinese may have played a similar game but it didn't evolve into golf. The acid test is where the first proper golf course came into being and it certainly wasn't China."

Todd said golf in Scotland may have evolved from a game played by the Dutch on ice and transported across the North Sea by traders sometime around the 12th century. "The first recorded game at St Andrews was in the 15th century but the sport had probably been around in the St Andrews area for a couple of centuries before that."

Glad that is settled. Now the Scots can rake in Chinese golf dollars without a loss of face for the guests. Chinese guests now rank just behind the Americans in average pounds spent on their golf vacations.