Club, which is the first golf club in Sabah. The original nine-hole, 3075m course was completed in the early 1900s. It is recognised as a challenging course due to the close proximity of roads and buildings around it. Importation of Chinese labourers The Company's next step was to bring in Chinese migrants to work the land. It resorted to bringing in foreign workers for the purpose because it felt that "the productive and industrial value of the alien races is... far greater than that of the natives of Borneo... it will be a very long time before the natives become, individually, as valuable assets to the State as the alien races". In 1882, the then Governor of North Borneo, William Crocker, requested the help of Walter Medhurst, who had just been appointed as immigration commissioner in China, to send Chinese migrants to British North Borneo. Medhurst offered free passage to British North Borneo to any Chinese people interested in seeking employment there. Most of these migrants disembarked and settled in Kudat and Sandakan, which were then the largest towns in the colony. By the time Medhurst returned to the United Kingdom in 1885, 348 of the 937 residents of Kudat were Chinese. Of these, 222 worked as shopkeepers. During this time, Kudat's significance had waned significantly as the Company moved the capital of British North Borneo to Sandakan. However, Chinese migration to Kudat continued, albeit at a slower pace. World War II During World War II, the Japanese Imperial Army built and maintained an airfield in Kudat with the help of locals and forced labour from Java, Indonesia. The runway was built using coral stones as a base. Many of the Indonesian labourers died from disease and hunger. In 1945, the United States Far East Air Force repeatedly bombed the airfield with its B-25 bombers, putting it out of action. The current Kudat Airport is built on part of the Japanese-built airfield. Post-war After World War II, Kudat received little attention from the rest of British North Borneo, having long been eclipsed by the rapid growth of Sandakan and Kota Kinabalu (then known as Jesselton). Further exacerbating Kudat's isolation was the fact that it was only accessible by sea until a road was built in the 1960s linking Kudat with Kota Kinabalu. Locals concentrated largely on the coconut and seafood industries until the 1990s, when small numbers of visitors began