The Bomun Lake resort, laid out by the state in the 1970s a few kilometres east of Gyeongju’s royal tombs, got its Hilton in 1991. It was a Daewoo project, built by the group’s own construction company. On its grounds Daewoo also opened a museum, the Sonje, designed by Kim Jong-sung, a pupil of Mies … Read more
Yangcheng Lake, north-east of Suzhou, is where the Chinese mitten crab, the hairy crab of the autumn markets, takes its name and its reputation; the season runs from September to December, and the lake town has spent the last few years trying to give visitors reasons to come in the other months. Banyan Group opened … Read more
Four Seasons Hotel Suzhou occupies a private island of nine hectares on Jinji Lake, reached by a bridge of its own. It is the hotel in Sun Hung Kai Properties’ ensemble in the Suzhou Industrial Park business district, alongside the Lakeside Four Seasons residences and the Suzhou ICC office and retail complex, more than 325,000 … Read more
Pantai Dalit is a stretch of beach in Tuaran, about 45 minutes by car from Kota Kinabalu’s airport. The resort covers some 400 acres of it: three kilometres of sand, an 18-hole golf course by Ted Parslow between the Tambalang and Mengkabong rivers, much of it laid out on former mangrove swamp, and 64 acres … Read more
Tunku Abdul Rahman Park was gazetted in 1974 as Sabah’s second national park, a group of islands just off Kota Kinabalu; Gaya, whose name means big, is the largest of them, and the resort says its forest has been a reserve since 1923. YTL Hotels opened Gaya Island Resort on Malohom Bay on 1 July … Read more
In 1982 Klaus Schleusener, a professor at IIT Madras, built himself a winter house with the Swiss architect Karl Damschen on a bare hill near the village of Pulinkudi, about ten kilometres from Trivandrum. It was octagonal. Friends kept coming to stay, so, as Kalpana Sunder told the story in India Currents, he bought more … Read more
Alistair Shearer, a British writer on India, tells the story in a few lines on his own website: he and “a couple of friends” bought twelve acres of coconut-palm grove on what he calls the isolated coast of Malabar, and the result is Neeleshwar Hermitage. He describes himself as its co-founder and gives evening lectures … Read more
The temple came first. The story told at Chittoor begins with a king of Cochin, Rama Varma, whose family had moved its seat from Perumpadappu to Tripunithura after an invasion by the Zamorin of Calicut, leaving him far from the Guruvayur temple where he worshipped. He built a Krishna temple in its likeness here, on … Read more
Tentrem is a Javanese word that the hotel translates as peacefulness and tranquillity. The owners are the Hidayat family, whose company, Sido Muncul, is a large maker of jamu, the traditional herbal medicine, and of the cold remedy Tolak Angin. Sultan Hamengku Buwono X, governor of the province, laid the first stone on 29 April … Read more
Kwik Djoen Eng was known in the Dutch East Indies as the Java Sugar King. In 1914 he and his brother founded the trading house Kwik Hoo Tong, which dealt in sugar, spices and tea and had branches across Java, and in 1918 he finished this house in the centre of Yogyakarta, on what is … Read more