Hotel · Chengdu

Upper House Chengdu

On the only street in Chengdu named in Manchu, Swire's hotel is entered through a restored Qing courtyard house and built as a larger courtyard house behind it.

Neighbourhood: Taikoo Li, Jinjiang
Rooms: 100
Status: Open
Design: Make Architects (architecture and interiors)

The hotel's address is 81 Bitieshi Street, a lane of about a hundred metres that is the only street in Chengdu with a name taken from Manchu. A bithesi was a clerk of the Qing administration, and the lane, the Sichuan press notes, still holds traces of a Qing government office found nowhere else in the city.

Guests arrive through one of its old buildings. The Bitieshi building, a restored Qing courtyard house, is the hotel's front door, and the way in runs through a gallery and a library to the reception lounge before anything new appears. Two more historic courtyard houses on the site were kept and now hold the spa and Mi Xun, the teahouse restaurant, which has a Michelin star; Make Architects, who designed the hotel, describe them as a buffer between the old fabric and the new.

Courtyard by courtyard

The new building belongs to Taikoo Li, the open-air district Swire Properties laid out with the Oval Partnership around the Daci Temple, and Make designed its architecture and its interiors. The plan reads as a siheyuan at a larger scale: two L-shaped blocks face each other across a green courtyard, and the routes to the rooms and to the public spaces pass through a series of smaller, sunken courts. At garden level the hotel shows only a single-storey brick front, the height of the old houses around it.

Modern glass and grey building of the hotel at Taikoo Li Chengdu with planting in front — The hotel’s modern building in Taikoo Li, 2019.

Below ground, the Italian restaurant, the gym and the pool are column-free rooms lit from above by large oval skylights. There are 100 rooms and 42 apartments, and five of the rooms are double-height, opening on to gardens.

Swire opened it as The Temple House. In October 2025 the group put its House hotels under one name, and it is now Upper House Chengdu, a sibling of The Upper House in Hong Kong and The Middle House in Shanghai. The new name drops the temple from the title. The Daci Temple, around which the whole district was planned, is still next door.

Sources: Make Architects; Sichuan Online; Swire Properties; TTG Asia; MICHELIN Guide