Delhi Golf Club - India

Not surprisingly, golf in India is rooted in the social history of the British Raj. Indeed, the Royal Calcutta Golf Club was founded in 1829, making it the oldest golf club in the world outside of Britain. Delhi Golf Club in New Delhi is a comparative youngster, tracing its origin to 1928, and it is one of the most interesting and exotic of the Indian courses because it is laid out among the 15th-century tombs of Moghul nobles. The unusual setting was selected by the chief of Delhi's horticulture department, a golfing Scotsman who headed a governmental committee entrusted with establishing a course for the capital city. An amateur archaeologist, he hoped to discover buried treasures while laying out what was originally known as the Lodhi Golf Club in the thick bush between the Moghul Emperor Humayun's tomb and the historic Babarpur tehsil, or estate. While no priceless artifacts were discovered, the course is one of the best in India, with the seventh green near the red sandstone Barah Khamba, or twelve pillars, a ruined mausoleum of the Afghan-Lodhi dynasty, and the Lal Bangla mausoleum beside the clubhouse. Expanded in 1950 and renamed the Delhi Golf Club, the Commonwealth War Graves Commission planted more than 200 trees and thousands of flowering shrubs, making the course a sanctuary for many species of Indian wildlife, including the peacocks that wander the fairways.

Victoria Golf Club - Sri Lanka

Like other former British colonies, Sri Lanka (Ceylon) has a long golfing tradition, with the English having founded Royal Colombo Club in 1882, followed by Nuwara Eliya Golf Club laid out in the hills amidst the tea plantations. The Sri Lanka Amateur Championship, begun in 1891, is the oldest national amateur championship in the world next to the British Amateur. Victoria Golf Club, flowing through 500 acres of farmland and jungle in Digana, just a few miles east of the former capital of Kandy, is the youngest of Sri Lanka's courses, having opened in 1999. Designed by English course architect and golf journalist Donald Steel, the narrow, rolling fairways ramble through coconut palms, Jak tree forests, majestic Mara trees, and pepper vines. The course overlooks the Victoria Dam and the Kandy Mountains.