The Best Places in China

Occupying the 41st through 72nd floors of Zhuhai Tower along the Wanzai waterfront, this Forbes Four Star hotel positions itself somewhere between the Pearl River Delta and the clouds. Wilson Associates designed the interiors with Gilded Age New York in mind, so expect creams, muted greens, and a certain studied grandeur. Two pools, butler service, and 251 rooms with sweeping views toward Macau make it easy to forget that ground level exists.

A curvy tower in Xintiandi that leans into contradictions, the Andaz is a boutique-feeling hotel inside a 28-story Hyatt property, where the rooms run red and rich hardwood, LED lighting shifts to suit your mood, and an iPad controls everything from the shades to room service. The French patisserie and modern Shanghainese restaurant give you reasons to stay in. Shopping and the Metro are a short walk out the door.

Floors 84 to 120 of China's tallest building, which means the Bund, the Huangpu River, and the Oriental Pearl Tower arranged below you like a scale model. This luxury hotel keeps 131 rooms and 34 suites, each angled differently by the tower's spiral form, all with full-length windows and round-the-clock butler service. Diptyque and Hermès in the bath, a spa, a pool, and seven restaurants, one of them up on the 120th floor.

Checkered tiles, timber walls, and green leather stools that look like a diner lost its passport and ended up in Huangpu. Pony Up is an all-day bar on Jinxian Road, open from early afternoon so the post-lunch crowd has somewhere respectable to be. The signature Cigar cocktail layers vermouth, absinthe, and a house smoke-infused spirit. Asia's 50 Best Bars has it on their Discovery list.

Ole Scheeren's glass cube sits a short walk from the Forbidden City, its facade patterned to echo Beijing's old hutong brick walls. This luxury hotel's 116 rooms lean into calm minimalism, with many looking straight out at the imperial complex. Two restaurants, a Guerlain spa, and a tea room dedicated to Chinese tea culture give guests plenty of reasons to stay put in the Wangfujing corridor. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

The lobby announces itself with a spritz of ginger flower scent, which you can buy bottled at the gift shop if you fall hard enough. The Langham is a 357-room luxury hotel sitting directly across from Xintiandi's cobbled shikumen lanes, with a three-story chandelier that sets expectations the guest rooms wisely dial back, trading drama for lacquered wood and modern Chinese calm. Club floors come with round-the-clock butlers, and the Chuan Spa handles the rest.

The rooms start on the 53rd floor, so the view of Guangzhou's Zhujiang New Town skyline is less an amenity than a given. This luxury hotel occupies the upper stretch of a 66-story tower, which keeps it literally above most of the neighborhood's competition and figuratively above quite a bit of it too. Service runs attentive without tipping into formal, and the design threads contemporary and traditional together without making a fuss about it.

A golden cloud of sculptural butterflies floats above the lobby seating, which tells you something about the register this hotel is pitching at. It's a Shangri-La property in everything but name, updated for guests who've stayed in enough boutique hotels to notice the difference. Rooms are high-tech without being fussy, the 35-meter pool is serious, and the window view of Rem Koolhaas's CCTV Tower is worth requesting specifically.

A three-story LED waterfall anchors the lobby of this Pearl River luxury hotel, which takes feng shui as a design brief and runs it through a nightclub filter. Three restaurants, a spa, and a heated indoor pool cover the daytime; a cocktail lounge with a resident DJ handles the rest. Guangzhou's CBD and convention centers are right outside, which explains the crowd, though the energy skews considerably more festive than the usual business address.

A 65-foot Czech crystal installation spirals through the lobby of this 27-story business hotel in Guangzhou's CBD, where the design nods to a traditional Xiguan mansion without taking itself too seriously. The 309 rooms come with pillow menus, free-standing tubs, and automatic shoe dryers, which is the detail that tells you the level. Five restaurants, a cocktail bar, an indoor pool, and a spa fill the rest of the time.

A rose gold glass facade shaped like a bridge announces this Fairmont hotel before you've even walked through the door. It sits in Beijing's Central Business District, close to Sanlitun and a short drive from Wangfujing, and the interior keeps the gold theme going from the two-story marble lobby to the bell-shaped rainshower heads upstairs. Rooms are spacious and quietly luxurious, with Bose speakers, Toto washlets, and bedside panels that handle most things you'd rather not stand up for.

The interiors by André Fu hide behind a glass tower: dark oak parquet, Carrara marble bathrooms, and marquetry woodwork that feel more Old New York than new Shenzhen. This 51-floor hotel on Qianhai Bay holds 289 rooms, a Cantonese restaurant, afternoon tea framed around Caroline Astor lore on the 35th floor, and a rooftop bar where the bay finally comes into focus. It holds a Forbes Four Star.

A glass pyramid in Chaoyang that turns out to contain a very serious business hotel, with Dalí and Warhol on the walls and a Panasonic massage chair waiting in every room. Bang & Olufsen audio, Philippe Starck at the desk, Riedel glassware stocked at the in-room bar: the amenity list reads like a very confident magazine spread. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key. Parkview Green puts a city's worth of dining and retail just outside the door, though leaving feels optional.

Fifty antique Ming and Qing dynasty houses were dismantled stone by stone and reassembled here, alongside ten thousand ancient camphor trees rescued from a rising reservoir, which is an unusual origin story even for an Aman resort. The 25-acre retreat southwest of Shanghai holds Michelin's 1 Key and a Forbes Four Star, and delivers the full Aman formula: obsessive quiet, flawless service, and architecture that makes you feel vaguely unworthy of the room.

A light installation in the lobby is meant to echo the ripples of nearby West Lake, which is a UNESCO World Heritage site and, conveniently, a short walk from the front door. This 13-story Shangri-La hotel sits on the northeastern edge of the lake, with open-air courtyards, four restaurants, and a spa inside. The Wulin Night Market and a scattering of parks are close enough to fill a long afternoon without planning much.

Perched above the Grand Canal in a mixed-use tower, this Four Seasons leans into what the design firm called "urban Zen," layered stone and pale wood doing quiet work against a floor-to-ceiling skyline. It's a full-service city hotel where the Chinese restaurant takes regional cooking seriously and tea service in the lounge is treated like a ritual, not an afterthought. The spa and pool sit high enough above Hangzhou to feel genuinely removed from it.

Purple carpets and hand-painted cloud murals make an unlikely opening statement for a business-district hotel, but that's the Four Seasons in Futian for you. The 26-floor tower sits across from the Convention and Exhibition Center, which tells you exactly who fills the rooms, though the green courtyard terraces and morning tai chi sessions suggest the staff would prefer you forgot the agenda. A Michelin Selected Hotel with a full spa and multiple restaurants.

Stone pathways and clay-tiled roofs wind through what was, not so long ago, an actual village: Amanfayun is a luxury resort built from 47 restored traditional courtyard dwellings set among tea fields and bamboo groves near West Lake. Behind the calligraphy scrolls and pitched wooden roofs are king-sized beds and underfloor heating. Buddhist temples are walkable, West Lake is a short drive, and the spa menu runs from traditional Chinese massage to tai chi.

The indoor pool here streams black-and-white films on a full-wall screen, which sets the tone nicely for a hotel that otherwise leans sharply modern and Chinese rather than gilt-and-chandelier Ritz. A glass skyscraper on Financial Street, it draws a weekday suit crowd that fills the Crystal Bar and afternoon tea service without much fuss. Rooms run large, with zebrawood bathrooms and full electronic controls. The spa and movement studio are worth the detour.

Walled inside its own private compound right beside the Summer Palace, this Aman property holds a collection of century-old guest houses arranged around ponds and gardens that the public never sees. The electronic amenities hide discreetly behind bamboo blinds and hand-carved screens, while pools, spa, and squash court all sit underground. Staff outnumber guests by a wide margin, which is rather the point. A Michelin Key property.

Floor-to-ceiling windows frame either the Pudong skyline or the slower curve of the Huangpu River, depending on which side of this large luxury hotel you land. The atrium soars, the beds are reliably cloud-soft, and Bvlgari amenities in the bath signal where this place sits on the spectrum. An infinity pool and spa add to the case for staying in, and rooftop cocktails come with the kind of panoramas that make the city feel like a prop.

An in-house craft brewery inside a luxury hotel is either a very good idea or a sign the minibar committee got out of hand, and at Kerry Hotel Pudong it reads as the former. This contemporary five-star sits beside Century Park in Pudong, with a vast sports and spa complex, a formal Cantonese restaurant, a casual steakhouse, and a brewmaster producing the IPAs. Rooms are spacious, the atmosphere a notch less stiff than the Shangri-La sibling upstairs.

Eighty-seven villas folded into the hills of Jiuzhaigou, a UNESCO World Heritage Site, each angled toward the Minshan mountains as if the views were part of the room service. This Ritz-Carlton Reserve leans hard into its setting, with Tibetan art and design throughout, a spa drawing on local tradition, and three restaurants cycling through Sichuan, Chinese, and Mediterranean menus. The Michelin Guide awarded it 3 Keys.

Two futuristic glass towers rise above the Qiantang River, and the hotel leans into that drama at every turn: rounded corners, polished marble, metallic accents, and a rippling glass installation in the lobby that riffs on nearby West Lake. The 324-room luxury hotel sits in one of China's ancient capitals, with Hangzhou's famous willow-fringed West Lake close enough that the designers couldn't stop referencing it, and neither can you.

The exterior looks like someone stacked enormous glass blocks and left them slightly askew, which turns out to be deliberate, a design by Andrew Bromberg that looms over Guangzhou's riverside with cheerful aggression. Inside, a 22-story atrium floods the marble lobby with light. This is a large luxury hotel with a spa, pool, rooftop bar, and multiple restaurants, and it draws everyone from Canton Fair regulars to leisure travelers happy to never leave the building.

The lobby is on the 37th floor, the pool is higher still, and the glass-bottomed bar platform juts past the building's edge, so you spend the whole stay slightly airborne. This luxury hotel in Hangzhou's eastern business district has New York firm Yabu Pushelberg's fingerprints all over it: plum blossom headboards, lake-blue tones, and marble, with Qiantang River views through floor-to-ceiling windows. West Lake is a short drive away when you finally come back down.

The lobby shifts from afternoon tea to Japanese street food to a drinks lounge over the course of a single day, which tells you something about the ambitions of this large international hotel near the Olympic Village and the National Convention Center. Floor-to-ceiling windows pull in natural light and views of the Bird's Nest. Earth-toned rooms run to deep soaking tubs and city panoramas, and the airport is a 30-minute drive.

KPF's glass facade borrows the silhouette of Suzhou's layered tile roofs and folding screens, so the hotel reads as local before you've even walked in. Silk wall panels and hand-worked lattice carry that same logic through the 190 rooms, which face out over the city. The indoor pool has the hush of a garden courtyard, and Lingering Garden is a short walk away for anyone who wants the genuine article.

Rooms at this 352-key luxury hotel on Shennan Boulevard start at a generous 40 square meters, and the decor reads timeless enough that you could plausibly lose track of the decade. The Langham brand leans hard into its English hospitality heritage, which here means Wedgwood china at afternoon tea, two pools, a spa, and a handful of restaurants running from Cantonese fine dining to whatever mood you're in.

The St. Regis occupies the top 25 floors of the Kingkey 100 tower, which means your room sits somewhere around the clouds above Shenzhen's sprawl. It's a luxury hotel with 290 rooms and suites, butler service around the clock, six restaurants and bars, an Iridium Spa, and a rooftop infinity pool. Inside, the design runs from Art Deco to street art without quite explaining itself, and the views of the city and mountains do most of the talking anyway.

Floor-to-ceiling windows cap the top floors of this 48-story tower hotel, designed by Yabu Pushelberg, with the kind of views over central Shenzhen that make you feel vaguely important for no good reason. Rooms run lavish, a well-equipped spa and indoor pool come standard, and the speakeasy-style bar at the very apex of the building gives the whole thing a satisfying sense of occasion. The Michelin Guide awarded it one Key.

Min Cai, the cooking of Fujian province, rarely gets the fine dining treatment, and Shanghai's 56th floor is an unlikely place to find it done seriously. Meet the Bund is a formal tasting restaurant where the chef reframes a regional tradition that tends to get overlooked in favor of flashier Chinese cuisines. The broth for the signature slow-cooked abalone dish takes several days to build, which tells you the kitchen's general attitude toward shortcuts.

The infinity pool lines up almost perfectly with Xianglu Bay, and on a clear day you can pick out the twin-scallop shells of the Zhuhai Grand Theater and the long arc of the Hong Kong-Zhuhai-Macao Bridge beyond it. This coastal hotel reopened recently after a full rebuild, with the rooftop bar, mountain-view gym, and Chinese and all-day restaurants carrying the new look. Jingshan Park and the famous fisher girl statue are a short walk away.

A 52-story hotel in Chengdu's Hi-Tech Zone where art-deco chandeliers the size of small spacecraft anchor the lobby and every room comes with its own butler service window. The Waldorf Astoria holds a Forbes Four Star. Six restaurants and bars cover everything from Cantonese to a rooftop whiskey bar on the 52nd floor where the jazz carries further than the skyline.

Floor-to-ceiling views of Shenzhen Bay anchor this Hyatt luxury-boutique hotel, set among the gleaming tech campuses of Nanshan. Designer Tony Chi gave the rooms a clean, contemporary frame and then softened it with leather chairs and marble baths, so it reads more New York loft than sterile business hotel. A 19-meter indoor pool and two restaurants round things out. It holds a Michelin Key.

Pork sliced thin enough to hold up to the light is the calling card here, a modern Sichuan restaurant in Chaoyang where the chef, a native of Emei, treats the cuisine's famously layered heat as a palette rather than a blunt instrument. The room draws a crowd that takes its Sichuan seriously, and the kitchen obliges with food that is fiery and precise in equal measure. It holds a spot in the Michelin Guide.