The Best Places in China

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame the curve of Dadonghai Bay from nearly every room in this modern beach resort, which sits where Sanya's city blocks start dissolving into the Luhuitou Peninsula. The minimalist interiors keep ornamentation light so the tropical view does the heavy lifting. An outdoor pool and poolside bar hold the daytime crowd together, and two restaurants mean you can avoid leaving until checkout without much suffering.

Thousand Island Lake spreads across a flooded valley holding more than a thousand islands, and this voco hotel sits on a peninsula with water on three sides of it. The architecture borrows whitewashed walls and dark timber from the regional Hui style, folded into something contemporary. Rooms run to freestanding tubs and lake views; family rooms add bunk beds and play tents for guests who travel with people under four feet tall.

A bas-relief of Yellow Crane Tower anchors the lobby, flanked by latticed timber screens and a golden chandelier that gives the whole check-in moment more drama than most hotels dare. This voco on Jianshe Avenue sits along Wuhan's old commercial spine near Northwest Lake, with rooms done in navy and yellow and cloud-patterned carpets. Wan Song Yuan Food Street is minutes away if you'd rather eat where locals eat than where the concierge points.

Gold-framed library shelving towers beside the reception desk, and park greenery fills every floor-to-ceiling window in this 226-room hotel along Fengcheng 9th Road. The double-height lobby announces the voco brand's fondness for warm neutrals and yellow accents early. CaiLing downstairs blends Cantonese cooking with Shaanxi inflections across six private dining rooms, and V Bar keeps the city skyline visible behind full-height glass on the second floor.

The gilded spire of the Grand Golden Pagoda is visible from the upper-floor balconies by day and lit against the night sky after dark, which is a reasonable argument for picking this 142-room voco over any other hotel in the district. Gaozhuang's Southeast Asian-inflected streets are right outside, and the full-glass gym keeps the pagoda in frame even mid-workout. Interiors run the brand's signature yellow and teal, with Elemis bath products and sculpted furniture throughout.

The lobby ceiling was designed to evoke a starry universe, and the architects at Cheng Chung Design apparently meant that literally in the best possible way, non-literally. This is a full-on luxury hotel, theatrical from arrival, with lavish rooms and the kind of high-end comforts that make the bill feel inevitable. The restaurants lean into contemporary Hunan cuisine, which in Changsha is exactly what you'd hope for.

Every one of the 372 rooms comes with a private balcony over Qujiangchi Lake, which sounds like a marketing line until you realize it holds across all 22 floors. This W Hotel plays the brand's signature maximalist hand: teal walls, patterned cushions, marble bathrooms with round mirrors the size of wagon wheels. WEI has open kitchens and theatrical plating, YEN handles Huaiyang fine dining under sculptural pendant lights, and WOOBAR does what WOOBARs do.

Xishuangbanna sits closer to the Mekong delta than to Beijing in spirit, and this boutique resort on the Lancang riverbank leans into that identity hard. Rattan, timber, red brick, and black roof tiles sit inside dense tropical foliage, with private hot spring baths and 24-hour butler service. Rainforest afternoon tea in the courtyard garden is exactly as good an idea as it sounds. A small, unhurried stay in a corner of Yunnan that operates on its own timezone.

A luxury hotel occupying the top quarter of a 263-meter tower on Zhongbei Road, the Wuhan Marriott Wuchang puts Sand Lake and East Lake in the window simultaneously, which feels like cheating. The lobby and corridors lean into Three Kingdoms lore, with Yellow Crane Tower motifs threading through the design. The M Club lounge claims the 61st floor with an outdoor terrace built for watching the city go dark. Rooms split between lake and city views, though at this height, both are doing a lot.

The skywells in the name are literal, narrow internal courtyards built centuries ago to pull daylight into a Huizhou-style mansion before electricity had opinions about it. The property has been restored into a luxury boutique hotel, with weathered old masonry set against freshly crafted traditional woodwork and modern furniture throughout. It sits in the rural Wuyuan hills, well outside anywhere resembling a city, which is rather the point.

The valley where they filmed Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon is a ninety-metre walk from the front door, which is a strong opener for any guesthouse. This small family-run spot sits at the edge of the Huangshan scenic area, and the hosts have been guiding visitors through the mountain's routes and quieter paths for over two decades. Evenings sort themselves out around an outdoor fireplace and hot tub.

You walk into Barules through a scarlet London phone box, which sets the tone nicely. Inside, this cocktail bar pays quiet tribute to the craft, with portraits of bartending legends lining the walls and glass cabinets full of cocktail kit. The menu leans fresh and fruit-forward rather than classical, which surprises you given all the reverence on display. A bar for people who know the names on those portraits and enjoy the slight irony of ordering something bright and tropical beneath them.

A retro Coca-Cola vending machine in what looks like an abandoned sandwich shop turns out to be the door, which is exactly the kind of entrance Flask deserves. The bar sits behind it down a narrow brick passage that fire marshals would probably prefer not to know about. It's the sort of cocktail bar that makes you feel briefly like a genius for finding it, then immediately guilty for telling anyone.

The 34-metre bar counter was painstakingly rebuilt from old photographs after the building's last tenant, somewhat anticlimactically, was a KFC. This cocktail bar inside the Waldorf Astoria on the Bund channels old Shanghai with enough conviction that the gap in the timeline barely registers. The room feels like it has always been here, which is either a triumph of restoration or a very good illusion, and at this point the distinction hardly matters.

Dial zero on the retro telephone tucked inside El Ocho and a door opens into a 17-seat cocktail bar where there is no menu, only a conversation. The bartender listens, then builds something to order, while hot towels and crystal water glasses set a register closer to Tokyo than Shanghai. The passion here is personal in a way a larger room could never sustain.

A two-storey glazed brewing tower rises through the center of this hotel microbrewery bar, and the smell of yeasty mash greets you before you've found a seat. The brewing kit gives the sleek, woven-brick room something to look at besides itself, and a retro motorcycle with sidecar, pool table, and big screens do the work of keeping it from feeling like a lobby concept. Good for an unplanned second round.

A warren of mirror-lined rooms on the third floor of Zhang Yuan, this cocktail bar runs on velvet seats, low light, and a sunken bar that makes the whole place feel like a speakeasy someone actually finished decorating. The menu skews classical, organized by Old-Fashioneds, Flips, Tiki, and the rest, with dark spirits leading the charge. The name is Spanish for eight, which is lucky, which the Chinese know, which means the odds are already in your favor.

Tucked into the first floor of an apartment block on Wukang Lu, this cocktail bar commits to a decorating scheme where Qing dynasty meets Louis XVI, with gilt, lacquer, velvet in purple and scarlet, lion heads, and birdcages all arriving at once. The menu balances house originals against classics like the Bramble and Sidecar, though the room has already done most of the theatrical heavy lifting before your drink arrives.

The menu arrives formatted as an airplane boarding pass, which tells you most of what you need to know about Avant. Jerry Tian, formerly of Alinea in Chicago, runs this contemporary fine dining room in Nanshan with a borderless, hyper-seasonal kitchen that hopscotches cuisines without apology. Next door he operates a dessert shop with its own nine-course chef's table, because apparently one room wasn't enough.

A preserved radish puff shaped like a carrot, pulled from edible "soil" at the table, is a reasonable introduction to what this 40th-floor fine dining room is doing with Cantonese cooking. The team leans into obscure Guangdong ingredients and labor-intensive technique without the usual white-tablecloth severity, which takes some doing at this altitude. Rare regional fare, playful forms, and a Buddha's hand chocolate that somehow makes sense.

Silk chandeliers and vintage collectibles set the mood in this dimly lit, courtyard-style Chiu Chow restaurant in Futian, where the kitchen follows the 24 solar terms as a guide to what's on the plate. The team, mostly Chaoshan natives, leans into heritage recipes and lu shui marinated dishes with a seasonal, back-to-basics discipline. A South China Morning Post 100 Top Tables pick, it draws the kind of crowd that arrives knowing exactly what to order.

A Cantonese dining room inside the Mandarin Oriental Shenzhen, where the menu spans Lingnan and Chaoshan traditions as though the two had never been separated. Chef Fei has spent decades in this cuisine, and the kitchen handles both an elaborate dim sum lunch and evening plates like crispy eel with osmanthus honey without breaking a sweat. The kind of room where the steamed BBQ pork buns alone could anchor the afternoon.

A craft brewery bar spread across three floors of Sinan Mansions, Boxing Cat is where Shanghai's American expat crowd discovered they didn't have to drink watered-down lager forever. Exposed brick, leather sofas, outdoor seating, a pool table, and table football upstairs give the place a cheerfully unfussy feel. Big screens run movies on the lower floor while the wifi-dependent tap away at laptops. The house-brewed beers are the whole point.