Songtsam Opens a Wang Shu-Designed Retreat Above Dianchi Lake in Kunming

Songtsam Linka Kunming opened in July 2026 in the Xishan district of Kunming, on a slope above Dianchi Lake. It has 53 rooms and suites. It is the twentieth property of Songtsam, the hotel group founded by the Tibetan film-maker Baima Duoji, and the first in a major city.

Why Kunming

Songtsam began in 2000 with a single lodge beside the Songzanlin monastery in Shangri-La, in the north-west of Yunnan. It has since built a chain of small lodges and larger retreats, which it calls Linkas, along the old Tea Horse Road, through the gorges of the Mekong and Salween and across the Tibetan plateau to Lhasa. Guests travel between them by road with the group’s own guides and drivers, on circuits of a week or more. The most recent of the mountain lodges covered here was Namcha Barwa.

Almost all of these journeys begin with a flight to Kunming, the provincial capital, at 1,900 metres. Until now guests spent the first night in an ordinary city hotel. The new Linka gives the circuits a starting point of their own, and the altitude makes it a useful place to acclimatise before going higher.

The architecture

The retreat was designed by Wang Shu, the Hangzhou architect who received the Pritzker Prize in 2012 and is known for buildings made with reclaimed brick and tile and with craft methods, such as the Ningbo History Museum and the Fuyang Cultural Complex near Hangzhou. It is his first hotel for the group. The buildings, of some 22,000 square metres, combine stone, timber, woven textiles and handmade ornament in a manner the group describes as Tibetan-inspired. Three free-standing villa suites are named after sacred mountains.

Facilities

There are four restaurants: Jing, for Cantonese and Chaoshan cooking, a Chinese restaurant, a Western one, and a Vietnamese and Southeast Asian table that reflects Kunming’s old railway link to Hanoi. A tea deck looks over the lake to the Western Hills.

The spa has an indoor pool and a yoga room, and offers the group’s movement programme, which assesses posture and gait before guests set out on trekking itineraries. Songtsam has been developing its wellness offering around Tibetan medicine at its mountain properties, and the Kunming retreat will serve as the place where new programmes are tried.

For travellers

Kunming is three hours by air from Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, and connected by high-speed rail to Dali, Lijiang and, across the border, to Luang Prabang. The city is worth a day in itself for its flower market, its lake and the Stone Forest. From here, the classic Songtsam route runs north to Dali, Lijiang, Tiger Leaping Gorge, Shangri-La and the wine village of Cizhong.