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
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
Amanjiwo was designed as an answer to a single building. Ed Tuttle, the American architect behind many of Aman’s early resorts, set it on the slope of the Menoreh Hills facing Borobudur across the Kedu Plain, and gave its centre the shape of the temple’s summit: a domed rotunda of the pale local limestone called … Read more
The hotel and its school began together. In 2004 Sokoun Chanpreda, a Cambodian businessman who had come home from abroad to invest in his country, started the Shinta Mani School of Hospitality in Siem Reap, giving free training to young Cambodians from poor families; according to the hotel, the classroom was converted staff housing. Bill … Read more
Bill Bensley designed the Hotel de la Paix in 2002, on Sivutha Boulevard in the middle of Siem Reap, and it became one of the best-regarded hotels in Cambodia. Ten years later it closed for a fourteen-month renovation, again by Bensley, and in August 2013 it reopened as Park Hyatt Siem Reap, Hyatt’s first hotel … Read more
King Norodom Sihanouk wanted a place near Angkor where he could lodge his family and visiting dignitaries, and in 1962 the French architect Laurent Mondet began the Villa Princière for him on the road from Siem Reap to the temples. Completed in 1963, it was a low, modern building around a curving pool and lawn, … Read more
A 125-key resort of white walls, grey roofs and still water on the edge of the canal town of Wuzhen, in northern Zhejiang.
A wellness sanctuary opened in 2005 on a forested hillside on the south coast of Koh Samui, built around a cave long used by Buddhist monks for meditation.