Beyond Beijing and Shanghai: China’s Most Distinctive Places to Stay

Most first journeys to China follow the same line: Beijing, Xi’an, Shanghai, perhaps Hong Kong. The hotels on that line are excellent, and largely interchangeable with those of any world city. The more interesting change of the past decade has happened elsewhere, in valleys, tea hills and old industrial sites, where a small number of projects have shown that a hotel in China can be the reason for the trip. These are the ones OKYTO would build an itinerary around.

Guangxi: a sugar mill on the Li River

Alila Yangshuo occupies a 1960s sugar mill between two karst peaks. Architect Dong Gong kept the brick buildings and the truss that once loaded cane onto boats, and placed the pool beneath it. It turned Yangshuo from a backpacker stop into a place for several unhurried days, best spent in the way described in our guide to the karst villages.

Zhejiang: temples, tea and a painter’s river

Outside Hangzhou, Amanfayun is laid out as a village in a valley of Buddhist temples and tea fields, and guests walk to morning prayers along a public path. Fuchun Resort sits among tea plantations above the Fuchun River, a landscape known to every student of Chinese painting. Both show what the region does best: restraint, water and green hills, an hour from Shanghai by train.

Near Shanghai: a village that was moved

Amanyangyun exists because one man decided to save 10,000 camphor trees and 50 Ming and Qing houses from a reservoir in Jiangxi, and moved them 700 kilometres. It is technically within Shanghai’s limits and belongs to another world.

Sichuan: the Taoist foothills

Six Senses Qing Cheng Mountain, outside Chengdu, pairs the city’s food with green slopes and a wellness programme, near the ancient Dujiangyan irrigation system.

Yunnan: altitude, tea and old trade routes

Yunnan has become the richest province for this kind of travel. Above Erhai Lake, The Dali EDITION stands at 2,090 metres on the slopes of Cangshan, with interiors inspired by Bai culture and its own tea plantation. In the capital, Shangri-La Kunming takes the region’s tea culture as its theme. Further north, the two-day walk through Tiger Leaping Gorge is one of China’s great treks, and in the far south the old tea forests of Jingmai Mountain are now a World Heritage site.

Tibet: lodges at the edge of the map

Songtsam, founded by Baima Duoji, has spent two decades building small lodges across north-west Yunnan and Tibet that can be linked into a circuit. Its Namcha Barwa lodge, at about 3,150 metres in Nyingchi, has 33 suites facing one of the highest peaks in the world.

How to use this list

None of these places works as a one-night stop. Each asks for three nights at least, and several combine naturally: Hangzhou with Shanghai by high-speed train, Chengdu with the Sichuan foothills, Dali with Lijiang and the gorge. High-speed rail has made the distances manageable, but mountain Yunnan and Tibet still need time, and Tibet requires a permit arranged in advance. The reward is a China that most visitors never see.