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. Six Senses announced its … Read more
Niccolo Chengdu fills Tower 3 of Chengdu IFS, the mixed-use quarter of some 760,000 square metres that the Hong Kong group Wharf built at the junction of Hongxing Road and Dacisi Road, with towers by Kohn Pedersen Fox. Wharf pitched the project in 2011 as “an oasis within Chengdu”, modelled on its Wheelock Square in … Read more
Before it was Rosewood Beijing, the hotel in Jing Guang Centre, a tower completed in 1989, was the Jing Guang New World Hotel, a property of New World, the group of Hong Kong’s Cheng family. In June 2011 New World Hospitality, chaired by Sonia Cheng, agreed to buy Rosewood Hotels & Resorts for US$229.5 million, … Read more
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 … Read more
The hotel lies just outside the East Palace Gate of the Summer Palace, separated from the imperial garden by a single wall. It is made of courtyard houses, some more than a century old, which Chinese accounts describe as the place where visitors once waited for an audience with the Empress Dowager Cixi, who made … Read more
The oldest part of Bvlgari Hotel Shanghai stands on North Suzhou Road, at the north end of the Henan Road Bridge. It was built for the Shanghai General Chamber of Commerce, founded in February 1912, which drafted China’s first business law and opened the country’s first commercial arbitration office. The site had been the residence … Read more
In 2002 Fuzhou, in Jiangxi province, approved the Liaofang reservoir, which was to flood a stretch of villages and camphor groves outside the city. Ma Dadong, who had grown up there and left at 22 for a business career in Shanghai, heard about it on a visit to his parents. He was 29, and he … Read more
No. 32 The Bund stands at the northern end of the waterfront, where Suzhou Creek runs into the Huangpu beside the lawns of the former British Consulate. The Peninsula Shanghai opened there in October 2009, with 235 rooms, none smaller than 54 square metres. Its owners described it as the first new building on the … Read more
Signiel Seoul opened on 3 April 2017, the day the Lotte World Tower opened and the Lotte Group turned fifty. It occupies the 76th to the 101st floors of the 555-metre tower: ballroom at the bottom, lobby and lounges on the 79th, restaurants on the 81st, pool and spa on the 85th and 86th, and … Read more
In 1932 the colonial government built a Buddhist temple on the lower slope of Namsan, in Jangchung-dong, in memory of Itō Hirobumi, and gave it as its entrance Heunghwamun, a gate taken from the palace of Gyeonghuigung. Bakmunsa was pulled down after liberation, and in 1967 the government put up a building of its own … Read more