Guangzhou’s White Swan Hotel Reopens After Three Years

The White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou reopened in July 2015 after three years of renovation, the longest closure in its history. The work cost 800 million yuan, about US$130 million, and reduced the number of rooms from 843 to 520, so that the smallest now measures 30 square metres and the largest suites three times that.

Few hotels in China carry as much meaning. The White Swan opened in 1983 on Shamian Island, the leafy former concession of European trading houses on the Pearl River, and it was the first five-star hotel in the country to be built and managed by Chinese owners in partnership with investors from Hong Kong, at the start of the period of economic reform. The Hong Kong businessman Henry Fok was the moving spirit. For the people of Guangzhou it was the first place of its kind that they were allowed to walk into, and a generation remembers its lobby as their first glimpse of the modern world. Its guests in the 1980s included Queen Elizabeth II, Richard Nixon and Deng Xiaoping.

The centre of that lobby has always been Gu Xiang Shui, hometown water, a garden three storeys high with a waterfall, a pavilion and a pool of carp, built in the style of the gardens of the Lingnan region. The renovation kept it exactly as it was, and when the hotel reopened, residents queued to see it again and to be photographed in front of it.

Elsewhere the changes were considerable. The rooms were rebuilt with new bathrooms and technology, club floors were created at the top of the tower, and the thirteen restaurants were reduced to seven. Jade River, the Cantonese restaurant overlooking the water, remains the place for dim sum in the morning, a ritual that many regard as the best reason to visit. Some 2,000 works of art are displayed through the building. The hotel has its own pier, with boats to the Canton Fair grounds at Pazhou.

Shamian itself is one of the most agreeable parts of Guangzhou, an island of banyan trees and 19th-century buildings, largely closed to traffic. The newer hotels of the city are in the towers of Zhujiang New Town, among them Rosewood Guangzhou and Four Seasons. The White Swan is the choice of those who want the river and the history.