The 100 Best Places in China

Three floors of earth-toned private dining rooms sit quietly behind the plane trees of the Former French Concession, feeling less like a restaurant than a place designed to lower your blood pressure. Fu He Hui is vegetarian fine dining with two Michelin stars and a spot on the World's 50 Best list, where set menus rotate quarterly and each course spotlights a single vegetable, fruit, or flower, paired with regional teas.

Ru Yuan sits inside the Hangzhou Botanical Garden, its floor-to-ceiling windows pulling the trees and stillness directly into the dining room. This is refined Zhejiang tasting-menu territory, the kind where dim lighting and low seating signal that the food is doing the talking. The chef's project is revival, not reinvention, bringing patience to heritage recipes that shortcuts had flattened elsewhere. Two Michelin stars and a spot on Asia's 50 Best at number ten.

A pitched-roof skylight fills the minimalist dining room with natural light, and the handpicked ceramics suggest you're somewhere that has thought carefully about everything. Lamdre is a fine-dining vegan restaurant in Sanlitun holding two Michelin stars and a spot on Asia's 50 Best list, where a seasonally changing menu draws on China's regional traditions and the chef's research trips into the country's lesser-known ingredients. The name comes from Tibetan Buddhism, which tells you the vibe isn't purely culinary.

White tablecloths, gloved service, crimson walls hung with avant-garde Chinese art, and a menu that gets progressively weirder as the night goes on. Ling Long is a fine dining restaurant on the Bund built around the concept of umami, with an eight-course set that traces a cross-China journey through regional terroirs. It holds a Michelin star and ranks on Asia's 50 Best list. The room is formal; the cooking is decidedly not.

Perched on an upper floor of the Ritz-Carlton with Pearl River views, Lai Heen is a Cantonese fine dining restaurant that holds a Michelin star and a Forbes Five Star. The cooking follows the classical Cantonese tradition, where precision and restraint do more work than showmanship. The room is formal without being stiff, the kind of place where a Sunday dim sum lunch feels like a proper occasion rather than a casual outing.

The Cerea family's fine-dining room sits on the third floor above the Bund, all comfortable bourgeois elegance with a wine list to match. The kitchen hunts down local Chinese produce and treats it with Italian discipline, which sounds like a concept and eats like a conviction. Paccheri alla Vittorio travels well. Two Michelin stars and a spot in the top five of 50 Top Italy's global ranking confirm the room is playing at a serious altitude.

Soy sauce in a martini garnish is the kind of move that either makes you put down your phone or pick it up to photograph the menu. Hope & Sesame is a Cantonese cocktail bar that runs sous-vide infusions and centrifuges alongside familiar pantry flavors from the region, landing on Asia's 50 Best Bars at number seven and the World's 50 Best Bars at twenty-nine. The room has expanded recently, which tells you something about how the city feels about it.

A fine dining room inside a resort hotel, set within a bamboo grove and built around the idea that Jiangnan cuisine carries an emotional charge, not just a flavor profile. The kitchen works with seasonal regional ingredients and traditional techniques, nudging them just far enough that the food feels familiar and slightly surprising at once. Thirteen private suites handle the banquet crowd. It holds two Michelin stars.

The art deco lobby on the Bund sets the tone: celadon walls, black marble floors, and the quiet suggestion that Shanghai's golden age never quite ended. This Forbes Five Star hotel carries a Michelin 2 Keys distinction and makes good on both with rooms where the tub fills at a button press and the drapes obey accordingly. The spa channels 1920s Paris, and the in-house restaurants cover fine dining and Cantonese without either feeling like an afterthought.

Stained-glass windows and stripped wooden floors give this fifth-floor Cantonese restaurant in the Rosewood Guangzhou the feel of a very grand old house that happens to serve roast goose. The kitchen works closely with named farms across Guangdong, which is the kind of supply chain that shows up on the plate rather than just the menu. It holds a Michelin star.

Forty-two restored siheyuan scattered across a historic hutong neighborhood, each behind its own wooden gate with its own address. That's the hotel, a Forbes Five Star and number fourteen on the World's 50 Best Hotels list. Getting to dinner means wandering laneway alleys past laundry lines and e-scooters, which is either charming or inconvenient depending on your mood, though a butler escort and buggy are always on call.

Eighteen seats around a U-shaped counter, with nothing between you and the open kitchen, is the whole premise at Taian Table. It's a tasting-menu restaurant, European with an Asian lean, and the menu rotates every few weeks so the kitchen never coasts. The setup is theatrical without being showy: you watch each course assembled in front of you, which makes the meal feel more like a collaboration than a transaction.

A 48-story tower cantilevered above a lovingly restored 1916 Chamber of Commerce building, all red brick and imposing columns, isn't a subtle move, but Bvlgari pulls it off. The hotel holds a Forbes Five Star and two Michelin Keys, and the rooms occupy the skyscraper's upper floors with views split between the Bund and the Pudong skyline. Bronze accents, travertine, and dark woods run throughout, and the subterranean spa is a serious operation.

The Rosewood Guangzhou occupies the top 39 floors of the CTF Finance Centre, which means you're checking into what may be the tallest five-star hotel on earth. Seven restaurants and bars, an expansive two-story spa, and some vertiginous views come with that altitude. The interiors run sleek and contemporary without feeling corporate. It holds both a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key, so expectations are set accordingly before you even reach the 70th floor.

Art Deco screens divide the dining room into something that feels almost private, despite the scale, and the color palette leans deep enough that you half expect a saxophonist to materialize. This is the Peninsula's flagship Cantonese restaurant, holding a Michelin star, where the kitchen pairs classical technique with a quietly modern hand. The eight-seat chef's table is the room's open secret for anyone who knows to ask.

The villas here were once shikumen townhouses, the narrow-lane brick dwellings that somehow survived Shanghai's tower-block era, and Capella has turned a preserved clutch of them into a boutique luxury hotel in Xuhui. Three-story interiors mix French and Chinese influences, and Pierre Gagnaire's only mainland China restaurant sits on the grounds. The spa runs to flotation tanks and traditional Chinese medicine treatments, which is a combination that feels very Shanghai.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Huangpu River from every room at this Forbes Five Star hotel on the Pudong side of Shanghai, where the skyline is newer and the architecture doesn't do the nostalgic Bund thing. Some 4,000 works of contemporary art fill the property, curated down to the last hanging angle. The spa has a separate lounge just for foot massages, a tepidarium, and a crystal steam room, which tells you how seriously they take the whole operation.

Seven private dining rooms, each named after a Chinese dynasty, ring the main hall at this Cantonese restaurant on the fourth floor of Rosewood Beijing. The kitchen holds a Michelin star and runs on a philosophy of restraint, letting the ingredient lead rather than the technique. The pastry course, a molten jackfruit number the chef has been refining for years, tends to stay with people.

The sculpted gardens by landscape designer Enzo Enea are the quiet surprise, a genuinely serene ribbon of green tucked into Chaoyang's embassy district. This is a luxury hotel where the Italian design firm Antonio Citterio Patricia Viel did every room, butler service comes standard, and Maserati handles the airport run. Forbes Five Star and Michelin's 2 Keys confirm what the imported marble and subterranean mosaic-tile pool already suggest.

A Frank Gehry fish lamp in red, pink, and peach dangles from the lobby ceiling, which is either a bold opening statement or a gentle warning about what follows. This Forbes Five Star, Michelin Key hotel sits steps from Wangfujing and a short walk from the Forbidden City, and the rooms face that direction deliberately. The spa has a skylight lap pool, the bar staff wear Vivienne Tam, and MO Bar runs late with cocktails and a sunset terrace.

Pearlescent white marble stretches across the lobby beneath a pair of Qin Feng ink paintings, with Peninsula Afternoon Tea laid out below them as if to say the British era never quite ended. This all-suite luxury hotel sits a short walk from Tiananmen Square, with Cantonese and modern French restaurants on site, a Clarins spa, and rooms where a bedside panel controls everything short of your mood. It holds a Forbes Five Star and a Michelin Key.

A 17-foot ceramic tree anchors the glass-ceilinged courtyard at the center of this 186-room hotel in Jing'an, and it's the kind of statement piece that actually earns the room. Rattan and blonde wood marquetry nod to old Shanghai without cosplaying it, and the geometric bathroom tiles are lifted straight from the city's classic mansions. The heated fifth-floor pool looks over the skyline, and Taikoo Hui is directly across the street for anyone who needs retail therapy first.

The mirrored ceiling doubles the snowy tablecloths, which tells you everything about the register here. Umberto Bombana's fine dining room, named after his favorite Fellini film, holds two Michelin stars and a Discovery nod from the World's 50 Best. Besuited waiters can discourse at length on Italian wine regions, and the aperitivo bar runs a negroni fortified with sweet wine and grapefruit bitters, so there's no reason to rush to your table anyway.

An elegant white villa in Changning where dinner requires advance planning, because many dishes must be pre-ordered before you arrive. This is refined Chaoshan cooking, the kind built on poaching, steaming, and braising, with light, precise seafood and vegetarian preparations served across five private rooms. There is no walk-in crowd, no open dining room, and no sense of hurry. The restaurant holds two Michelin stars.

Tucked into a hutong near the Lama Temple, this serene fine-dining restaurant holds two Michelin stars and makes a serious case for vegetarian cooking without leaning on the word "vegetarian" as the point. Chinese classics get quietly disassembled and rebuilt using techniques borrowed from both sides of the world. The menu rotates every two weeks, so regulars keep coming back, which they do.

A four-room garden villa on a quiet leafy street, with just 18 covers and no menu to choose from. This intimate fine dining restaurant serves set menus built around chef Lan Guijun's signature Sichuan cooking, where a dish like hand-pulled Golden Thread Noodles arrives as something closer to a statement than a snack. Anthony Bourdain made it one of his first stops in Chengdu, which tells you roughly what kind of place this is.

Piero Lissoni's near-monochrome modernism meets Shanghai's jade greens in a lobby so theatrical it makes the chandelier work for its keep. This boutique luxury hotel in Jing'an holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star, and its crowd runs to fashion people who dress for the lobby like it's a second outfit. Café Grey Deluxe spills onto a terrace; the spa and pool keep things civilized. Rooms run large and quiet, which is rarer than it sounds.

Thousands of glass feathers hang from a mirrored ceiling above stainless-steel pillars, which is not what most people picture when they think of a Sichuan restaurant. The chef has appeared on Chinese food television, and the menu runs from Sichuan street food classics to wood-roasted aged Peking duck, all inside a room that seems to be auditioning for a science-fiction film. GT Land Plaza, fourth floor, Zhujiang New Town.

Nine private rooms tucked inside a building that also contains a furniture showroom and a Japanese tea room, which tells you something about the neighborhood's ambitions. This is a refined Chiu Chow restaurant where the menu bends around seasonal availability and what you actually feel like eating. The kitchen works in the old regional tradition without being precious about it, and the whole thing holds a Michelin star.

Cloisonné metalwork hangs in every room, paintings drawn from ancient gongbi and ink-wash traditions line the lobby, and the sixth-floor pool is ringed by sculpture from leading Chinese artists. This is a luxury hotel in Chaoyang's business district that takes "cultural programming" seriously enough that you almost forgive them for calling the concierge a "curator." Forbes Four Star and a Michelin Guide 2 Keys. Seven restaurants, a Sense spa, and Frette linens round things out.

The Long Bar's 110-foot mahogany counter is the old Shanghai Club's most famous survivor, painstakingly restored from archival photographs, and it sets the tone for this luxury hotel on the Bund. Two buildings in one, the neoclassical wing houses the suites while a modern tower holds the rest of the 260 rooms, all of them large, all of them equipped with Japanese electronic toilets and mirror-embedded TVs. Forbes Four Star. The in-house florist and personal shopper are not a joke.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the Huangpu River and the Pudong skyline, which is a lot of competition for what's on the plate. This is a formal Cantonese banquet restaurant on the Bund, small enough that a few private rooms account for most of the seating. The kitchen revives a style of multi-course celebratory cooking that had largely receded from view, with seasonal menus and a sweet-and-sour pork whose sauce rotates by season. It landed on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list.

The 105-foot bar running the length of the lobby sets the tone: a design hotel that takes the calm seriously. Dark wood, black stone, and muted fabrics give the place a spa-like stillness unusual for the middle of Jing'an District, and floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the park rather than the street. A Forbes Four Star and a Michelin Key, with a 25-meter pool and full spa downstairs for anyone who came to Shanghai to genuinely decompress.

You enter through a restored Qing Dynasty courtyard, then an elevator delivers you to rooms that start at nearly 700 square feet of white linen and black stone. The hotel, part of a conservation and modernization complex around an old temple, holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star. Sichuan cuisine awaits outside, but with Italian, a teahouse, cocktail bar, and a spa with its own courtyard, leaving becomes optional.

Art deco gets a Pudong makeover here, all cream marble bathrooms with gold accents and floor-to-ceiling views of the Bund. The Ritz-Carlton Shanghai is a full-scale luxury hotel that earns its Forbes Four Star and Michelin Key without making you feel like you're staying inside a brochure. The rooftop bar, Flair, draws a crowd that's genuinely split between locals and guests, which is the clearest sign a hotel has figured something out.

Stepping off Nanjing West Road into this hotel is a mild form of culture shock, the lobby so deliberately quiet and unadorned it reads almost like a provocation. Local design duo Neri and Hu stripped out every chandelier and gold leaf flourish that usually signals luxury in Shanghai, replacing it with an organic minimalism that somehow still feels warm. Holding a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star, it has 170 rooms and suites, a Thai-style spa, and a transplanted Italian restaurant.

The top floors of a 79-story Futian skyscraper, where the rooms are among the largest in Shenzhen and the panoramic windows do a lot of the decorating for you. This Forbes Five Star, Michelin Key hotel has eight restaurants and bars, including the much-talked-about Bay by Chef Fei, plus a 68th-floor spa with treatments that involve quartz sand, which sounds either deeply relaxing or like something you'd need explained twice.

Seventeen acres of gardens, lily ponds, and black-tiled pavilions arranged around a UNESCO-listed lake, and the whole thing still manages to feel like it simply grew here. This small luxury hotel, holding a Michelin 2 Keys distinction, keeps only 78 rooms, from traditional doubles up to three-story villas. The restaurants run Chinese and Western, with eleven private dining rooms, each one opening onto the gardens, which is a lot of rooms for a hotel that already feels like a retreat.

The green copper roof has presided over the Bund since the Twenties, back when Noël Coward was allegedly writing plays here between drinks. This Art Deco landmark is a luxury hotel where the octagonal marble lobby, glazed dome, and original Lalique wall art do most of the talking. Rooms are elegant and genuinely comfortable, the Jazz Bar's house band holds a Guinness record, and the location, where the Bund meets Nanjing Road, is as central as Shanghai gets. A Forbes Four Star property.

The interiors, by Yabu Pushelberg, layer black lacquer and brushes of red and gold against a restraint that reads as quietly Western, somehow making both coexist without apology. This 175-room luxury hotel sits in the heart of Wangfujing, close to the Forbidden City, with a staff-to-guest ratio that the Michelin Guide calls nearly one to one but that feels like ten to one. A full-service spa, heated pool, and three restaurants round things out. It holds a Michelin Key and a Forbes Four Star.

A 20-story inner atrium lined with 400 stainless-steel butterflies by Australian artist Jayne Dyer sets the tone for this luxury hotel in Chaoyang. Deluxe rooms run nearly 500 square feet, with bathtubs angled toward the city skyline. The spa has 11 suites and a treatment menu long enough to require reading glasses. Forbes Four Star, and selected by the Michelin Guide.

The rooms begin on the 74th floor, which should tell you everything about what kind of hotel this is. Four Seasons occupies the upper third of a 103-story tower in Guangzhou's Pearl River New City, and the views over the city are genuinely hard to argue with. The atrium alone will stop you mid-sentence. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. Multiple restaurants, a spa, and a pool round out the floors below.

The Park Hyatt occupies floors 79 through 93 of the Shanghai World Financial Center, which means the infinity pool sits on the 85th floor and the views from your room are, by any measure, absurd. Inside, the palette runs to gray, cream, and dark wood, the whole thing feeling more like a very well-appointed private residence than a tower hotel. Contemporary Chinese art and the occasional patch of grass keep it from reading too serious. A Forbes Four Star property.

The lobby sits on the 64th floor, which tells you everything about the kind of hotel this is. Part of the Shangri-La family, it occupies the top stretch of Beijing's tallest tower, with an infinity pool on the 78th floor and views that make the city look like a model set. Rooms are large by any standard, the spa is enormous, and the tea selection is reportedly among the biggest in the capital. A Forbes Four Star property.

Five tables in a warm wood-clad room, an open kitchen where chefs finish dishes in front of you, and a seasonal tasting menu that runs on produce from the team's own farm outside the city. Modern Chinese cooking shaped by French technique, Co- holds a Michelin star and a spot on The 50 Best Discovery list. Intimate enough that the meal feels less like a restaurant visit and more like being let in on something.