The Omega China Tour was a China-based men's

professional golf tour Professional golf tours are the means by which otherwise unconnected professional golf tournaments are organised into a regular schedule. There are separate tours for men and women; most are based in a specific geographical region, although some to ...

that ran from 2004 to 2009. The tour was created to encourage the development players who intended to move up to the

Asian Tour The Asian Tour is the principal men's professional golf tour in Asia except for Japan, which has its own Japan Golf Tour, which is also a full member of the International Federation of PGA Tours. Official money events on the tour count for Wor ...

or other major international tours, and also to help accelerate the development of

golf Golf is a club-and-ball sport in which players use various clubs to hit balls into a series of holes on a course in as few strokes as possible. Golf, unlike most ball games, cannot and does not use a standardized playing area, and coping wi ...

in the

People's Republic of China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

, following the sports reintroduction to the country in the 1980s, having been absent during the early communist era. Launched by the China Golf Association in 2005, the tour began with four three-day tournaments, each with a minimum purse of

US$ The United States dollar (symbol: $; code: USD; also abbreviated US$ or U.S. Dollar, to distinguish it from other dollar-denominated currencies; referred to as the dollar, U.S. dollar, American dollar, or colloquially buck) is the official ...

100,000. This increased to six four-day tournaments in 2006, and then eight in 2007. It was initially planned to have ten tournaments in 2008, but this was not possible, and there were again eight events. There were four events in 2009 after which the tour folded. China has hosted some big-money

European Tour The European Tour (currently known as the DP World Tour for sponsorship reasons), legally the PGA European Tour is the leading men's professional golf tour in Europe. The organisation also operates the European Senior Tour (for players aged fift ...

sanctioned tournaments, but at the launch of the Omega China Tour, the executive vice-president of the China Golf Association Jiang Xiuyun commented, "The future for golf in China – the real, long-term future – is not paying large sums to bring the world's superstars to play here. It is creating our own stars". The

Singapore Singapore (), officially the Republic of Singapore, is a sovereign island country and city-state in maritime Southeast Asia. It lies about one degree of latitude () north of the equator, off the southern tip of the Malay Peninsula, borde ...

-based World Sports Group was granted a five-year contract to organise the events.

Order of Merit winners

References

{{Men's Professional Golf Tours Golf in China Professional golf tours