Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain

Mount Qingcheng, west of Chengdu, is where the Celestial Master Zhang Daoling founded the Way of the Five Pecks of Rice in 142, and Tianshi Cave on its slopes is called the birthplace of Taoism; with the Dujiangyan irrigation system, begun in 256 BC, it was inscribed by UNESCO in 2000.

Photo: JianEn Yu / Wikimedia Commons · CC BY 2.0

Six Senses announced its first resort in China at the foot of the mountain in 2011, to follow Taoist and Chinese principles of design and to sit empathetically with the terrain, for 2013. It received its first guests on 1 August 2015 and opened officially on 1 September, then the largest Six Senses anywhere. "Tao, meaning the Way, considers all things to be unified and connected," said Neil Jacobs, the group's chief executive, at the opening.

Six Senses' in-house designers worked with the Bangkok practice Habita Architects, and AECOM laid out the landscape. The suites follow the siheyuan, the Chinese courtyard house: two storeys, opening on the ground floor to a private courtyard and above to a balcony over the gardens, in clusters of four around a shared pavilion, which can be taken whole as a single compound.

Tiled roofs, pale timber, woven-cane lanterns and moon doors recur, a canal runs through the grounds under arched footbridges, and native bamboo is planted throughout. There are 130 keys today, among them suites with hot-spring tubs in the bamboo, and the resort's own farm supplies its kitchens. OKYTO's Chengdu guide covers the city and its surroundings.

At the centre is the spa, a circular walled building on an elliptical plan that Habitus compared to Tadao Ando's Oval at Benesse House on Naoshima. Its treatments draw on Taoism and Chinese medicine, from Daoyin massage to three journeys named Jing, Qi and Shen, and its ten treatment rooms look out over waterfalls and gardens.

Sources: Hospitality Net; TTG Asia; Habitus; Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain; Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain; MICHELIN Guide; Wikipedia; Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain