Of all the cities of over 10 million people, Beijing consumes the least amount of water per capita. However, with 60 golf courses found across the city, 40 million tons of groundwater are pumped up and used to irrigate the greens. That's approximately the same amount of water that 1 million people consume in a year.

The tap is on, and won't be stopped until late afternoon. In this suburban golf course in Beijing, this kind of irrigation happens every day.

The field covers 15 hundred hectares of land and will consume hundreds of tons of water every day.

This staff member who doesn't want to publish his name says grass from the golf course needs clean water, so the company introduced ground water to irrigate.

Prof. Su Derong, Beijing Forestry University, said, Golf courses need irrigation seven to eight months a year. Each will consume 400 thousand cubic meters of water every year. And almost all of the irrigation water is from underground.

Beijing's ground water is going through a crisis. The city's current consumption of ground water has gone 10 billion cubic meters over it's warning levels.