The Best Places in China

Floor 68 of the Shanghai Tower, with The Bund spread out below like a very expensive screensaver, is where the Burgundy institution Maison Lameloise set up its China outpost. It's a fine-dining French restaurant, the kind where the tablecloths mean business, turning classic Gallic technique toward ingredients that cross cultures with more grace than the concept deserves to sound on paper. The Shanghai kitchen holds a Michelin star.

A restored courtyard mansion in a Beijing hutong, with high ceilings and a view that shifts through the seasons. This is a Michelin-starred dining room built around traditional Beijing cooking given a careful modern rethink. The Peking duck, fired over jujube wood and served three ways, is the anchor, but the kitchen ranges further than that. Beijing-themed cocktails round out a meal that takes the city's culinary past seriously without turning it into a museum.

Antlers on the white walls, no moose on the menu, a century-old Shanghai mansion doing its best impression of a gallery. This is a polished Jiangzhe restaurant where the chef's decades in Huaiyang cooking show in dishes built around technique rather than trend. The crispy white teat fish, a sea cucumber preparation that arrives in a crackling crust, is exactly the kind of thing that earns a Michelin star without needing to explain itself.

A private collection of Chinese antiques lines the walls of this low-lit, polished-wood dining room inside the Tangxiang Cultural Space on Xikang Road. Obscura holds a Michelin star for its tasting-menu cooking, which folds Sichuan tradition and forgotten regional techniques into something genuinely its own. The chef duo spent a year crossing China before opening, and the research shows on the plate without feeling like homework.

A glass atrium rises 23 floors above the Tea Garden at the center of this hotel spa, so when you're sipping tea between treatments, Beijing's traffic feels more like a rumor. Eleven treatment rooms range from singles to VIP double suites with their own steam showers and tubs, and a sunlit pool with city views rounds things out. It holds a Forbes Four Star rating, and the quiet is the kind you notice.

Seafood pulled from the East China Sea arrives at this contemporary Chinese restaurant in Hangzhou's Binjiang district with a precision that suggests the kitchen takes terroir as seriously as any French farmhouse. The team builds a menu around Taizhou produce, threading classical Chinese instincts through a modern, almost architectural presentation. One Michelin star and a spot on The 50 Discovery list confirm the room is not just scenery.

Ningbo cooking occupies a specific lane: intensely briny, fermented-forward, and proud of it. This upscale restaurant on the 56th floor of Raffles City The Bund leans into that tradition, anchoring the menu around wild seafood pulled from the East China Sea that morning. The room runs to aubergine walls, linen, and chandeliers, which creates a pleasant contrast with dishes built around deliberately pungent ingredients. It holds a Michelin star.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Positioned on the Suzhou River with views across to the Bund and the Lujiazui skyline, this hotel sits in Hongkou, one of the few Shanghai neighborhoods where art deco facades still stand and elderly residents haul groceries home from the wet market. Inside, the mood shifts to grand: over a thousand artworks sourced globally fill the interiors. A Forbes Four Star property, it's the first Bellagio outside the United States, with 162 rooms, dining, and a full spa.

A glass-and-steel tower whose LED facade pulses through hexagonal patterns after dark, this luxury hotel sits at the center of Sanlitun, Beijing's liveliest nightlife and shopping neighborhood. Rooms have floor-to-ceiling windows, curvilinear layouts, and freestanding tubs, and the lobby tea bar runs afternoon service for anyone needing a quiet moment amid all that fashionable noise. It holds a Forbes Four Star.

Some rooms look straight down onto a centuries-old temple that the surrounding mall simply absorbed, which tells you something about how Chengdu works. This Forbes Four Star hotel sits at the top of the city's International Finance Square, and the rooms lean into the height: oversized windows, deep soaking tubs, 500-thread-count linen as standard. Yue Hin handles Cantonese, Sichuan and Huaiyang cooking; the Tea Lounge has its own sommelier.

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.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame Canton Tower and the Pearl River from the upper reaches of G.T. Land Winter Plaza, which is where Jumeirah plants its Guangzhou flag. The hotel runs a Forbes Four Star property with marble interiors, bold art, and bathrooms that make checkout feel like a personal failing. Cantonese dining and a rooftop bar share the building with a pool and gym, all of it landing squarely in Tianhe's orbit of malls and business towers.

The bathrooms alone justify a conversation at dinner. This luxury hotel tower in central Tianhe holds 263 rooms finished in Tony Chi's clean, contemporary lines, with views across a city that moves fast and builds faster. The Taikoo Hui mall connects directly from the lobby, so you can spend a week without stepping outside if that appeals. A Forbes Four Star property, and the Cantonese restaurant is the right flagship for Guangzhou.

Rooms at this 500-room business hotel look one way toward the Forbidden City and the other toward Wangfujing's shopping stretch, which is a genuinely useful piece of urban luck. Interiors run to aubergine and gold, with full-length windows, deep soaking tubs, and glass-walled bathrooms that outdo most home setups. The Serenity Spa runs until 1 a.m., and Lei Garden draws Cantonese food devotees who aren't staying here at all.

Marble foyers with fresh flower arrangements set the tone at this Ritz-Carlton in Chaoyang, which leans into the brand's old-school grandeur rather than chasing whatever the newer one is doing across town. It's a full-service luxury hotel with a heated pool, a spa, and all-day dining. Guest rooms come with a Chinese-style teapot and complimentary tea, and the marble-lined tubs have their own TV for anyone who considers that a necessity. Forbes Four Star.