Clinique La Prairie Opens Its First Health Resort in Anji
The Swiss longevity clinic chose the tea hills of Zhejiang for its first resort outside Montreux, with 29 rooms in seven villas and medical-led programmes.
Clinique La Prairie, the Swiss medical and longevity clinic founded in Montreux in 1931, opened its first Health Resort outside Switzerland in early 2024 in Anji, a county of bamboo forests and tea farms in Zhejiang province, about 180 kilometres west of Shanghai and in the hills north-west of Hangzhou.
The project was announced in August 2022 with the Chinese developer Sunjoy Group and was first scheduled for 2023. It is deliberately small. The 1.3-hectare site has 29 rooms and suites spread across seven villas, grouped around a main building that houses the medical, wellness, movement and nutrition departments, the four areas the clinic calls its pillars of longevity. The setting, beside a lake and facing wooded mountains, was chosen in part because it recalls the clinic’s home on Lake Geneva.
Guests come for programmes rather than for nights. The resort offers the clinic’s signature stays, including longevity, detox, weight management and wellness programmes, typically lasting about a week and built around medical assessment, nutrition and supervised movement. One programme does not travel: Revitalisation, the treatment on which the clinic made its name, remains available only in Montreux.
Anji is the first step of a much larger plan. Chief executive Simone Gibertoni has spoken of developing up to 50 properties worldwide, combining resorts of this kind with smaller urban Longevity Hubs such as those already opened in Madrid, Bangkok and Doha. For Sunjoy chairman Michael Zhu, the point of the partnership was to bring that expertise to a natural site in China rather than to a city tower.
The opening matters for two reasons. It confirms that medical wellness, long associated with Switzerland, Austria and Thailand, now has a serious address in mainland China. And it adds to the standing of Anji and the neighbouring Moganshan hills as a retreat area for travellers based in Shanghai and Hangzhou, alongside resorts such as Alila Anji.