If you’re a Pu’er fanatic, you know that it comes from Yunnan province in China and has a long history there. And, more likely than not, you know that Yunnan was originally settled mainly by ethnic groups who didn’t speak Chinese. When these people established villages, they of course gave them names … in languages other than Chinese.

As Yunnan became sinicized, the non-Chinese place names gradually gained shadow names that approximated, in the phonemes available to speakers of Chinese (Mandarin, for a first approximation), the original names. As time went on and Chinese language, culture, and government came to dominate Yunnan, these shadow names became the “standard” names. And these Chinese names were of course written down in Chinese characters that reproduced the sounds that native Chinese speakers used in “renaming” villages, mountains, and the like.

When foreign words or names get transliterated into Chinese by people who are just trying to get on with their lives, the characters chosen often don’t make a lot of sense. (This is not true when a commercial product name is transliterated into Chinese by the kind of genius who turned “Coca-Cola” into “可口可乐”!)

As a result, the place names Pu’er lovers learn tend to be strings of characters that, when taken literally, can be pretty comical or, at best, unrelated to what the original namers were thinking. Take land-locked Menghai (勐海): the name means “brave ocean.” The characters for the Bulang (布朗) mountains, which are actually named for the Blang ethnic group, mean something like “the cloth is bright.”

Pu’er golf is a way of having some fun with the linguistic absurdities of Pu’er nomenclature. All you have to do is augment a Pu’er place name with enough extra characters to make a coherent sentence. You might, for example, say “Meng hai chi chuan” (勐海吃 船): the brave ocean swallows boats. The shorter the better, which is why it’s called Pu’er golf. Imagination counts, too, and wit.

If you play a “round” of Pu’er golf and like your results, you might want to publish them. You could send me an email. You could also tweet it with a hashtag of #puergolf and, if you’d like me to notice, mark it with @babelcarp — you’re unlikely to need anything near 140 characters!