Hotel · Shanghai

Amanyangyun

Amanyangyun is built from Ming and Qing houses and camphor trees carried 700 kilometres from a Jiangxi valley before a reservoir flooded it.

Neighbourhood: Minhang
Rooms: 35
Status: Open
Design: Kerry Hill Architects

In 2002 Fuzhou, in Jiangxi province, approved the Liaofang reservoir, which was to flood a stretch of villages and camphor groves outside the city. Ma Dadong, who had grown up there and left at 22 for a business career in Shanghai, heard about it on a visit to his parents. He was 29, and he decided to take away as much as he could.

About fifty Ming and Qing houses were taken down by a team of more than 200 people and carried 700 kilometres to Shanghai, where they waited in a disused air-conditioning factory Ma owned on the edge of the city. The trees followed by road over twelve months, on roads and bridges built for the trucks, some of which floods overturned. By 2005 everything had reached Minhang, on the south-western side of the city.

The hotel came later. Aman says it joined the project in 2009; Kerry Hill Architects designed the resort, and it opened in January 2018. Its name, Yangyun, "nourishing cloud", is taken from an inscription in the Forbidden City.

Fifty houses, a thousand trees

Only some of the houses became hotel rooms. The resort's 11 Antique Villas are reassembled Fuzhou houses, restored to hold up to five bedrooms each, with a garden and pool; other rebuilt courtyards are private residences. The 24 Ming Courtyard Suites are new buildings. The grandest of the rescued buildings, formerly a private school, is now Nan Shufang, named after the reading pavilion of the Forbidden City and used for calligraphy, seal carving and Kunqu opera, with nine small rooms for tea and incense.

Grey brick facade of a reassembled Ming or Qing house with a small arched door at the end of a garden path — An antique villa at Amanyangyun, 2026.

The figure that travelled with the opening was 10,000 camphor trees. CNN's account from that time is more precise: about four in five survived the move, just over a thousand stand on the resort's grounds, and the rest were planted on public land nearby as a park. The biggest of those on the grounds stands at the entrance to Nan Shufang. It weighs 80 tonnes, takes seven people to encircle, and guests are invited to water it.

Sources: Aman; Aman; CNN Travel; China Daily; TTG Asia