The Best Hotels in Changzhou

The Marriott occupies the upper floors of the 333-metre Modern Media Center, Changzhou's tallest tower and a building shaped after the ancient Tianning Pagoda. A full-service hotel with 268 rooms that look out over the city from real altitude, each fitted with Jintan paper-cutting art, a craft with National Intangible Cultural Heritage status. Huaiyang and Cantonese cooking, Italian, and an all-day bistro cover most moods. China Dinosaur Park is a five-minute drive.

The indoor pool's sculptural ceiling is the kind of thing that stops you mid-stroke. This voco hotel near China Dinosaur Land skips the standard-issue beige of most Chinese business hotels for navy and mustard rooms with open-frame wardrobes and paneled headboards. The in-house Tian Xiang Lou runs Huaiyang and Cantonese cooking across 25 private dining rooms, so the food situation is more serious than the theme-park address might suggest.

A tiered chandelier anchors a circular lobby ringed by hand-painted landscape murals, and the scale only compounds from there. This is a grand business-district hotel in Changzhou's Wujin Hi-Tech zone, where upper-floor suites come with curved floor-to-ceiling windows and a formal Chinese palatial sensibility that stops just short of requiring a dress rehearsal. Tian Xiang Lou seats nearly 300 and has 19 private rooms, one with its own entrance.

A full-service Marriott in the commercial heart of Jintan, halfway between Mount Maoshan, where Shangqing Taoism was born, and Changdang Lake, one of Jiangsu's largest freshwater stretches. The 280 rooms run generous, and the hotel covers its dining bases with Goji Kitchen and Bar for regional Chinese from an open kitchen and the more formal Man Ho for when the occasion calls for it. Changzhou North Railway Station is about half an hour away.