The Best Places in China

Raffles occupies the central tower of One Shenzhen Bay, which means rooms look out over the bay from a height that makes the city feel theoretical. The hotel carries its colonial Singapore heritage lightly, pairing classic room details with butler service, Ferragamo bath products, and enough high-tech convenience to keep you busy. Cantonese, Japanese, and Western restaurants share the building with a spa and a 25-meter indoor pool. It holds a Michelin Key.

The 52-story sail-shaped tower is hard to miss from anywhere on Haitang Bay, and inside, the aquatic theme goes well past decor: the Neptune and Poseidon suites put your bedroom below the waterline, glass wall facing a live aquarium. It's a sprawling resort in the Atlantis mold, 130 acres of waterslides, marine encounters, pools, and 21 restaurants. Gordon Ramsay's Bread Street Kitchen handles the British contingent. Forbes Four Star.

The buildings are sand-colored and scattered across a hillside in China's Min Mountains, staged to look more like a village than a luxury resort, which is either modest or very clever marketing. Either way, Jiuzhai Valley National Park fills every window, and the Conrad earns its Forbes Four Star rating by leaning into that view without coasting on it. Sleek interiors and polished service keep things feeling properly high-end once you're inside.

Perched on floors 37 through 54 of a sail-shaped tower on Xiamen's southwestern coast, this Forbes Four Star hotel arranges wall-to-wall windows so that the views over Gulangyu Island and the bay follow you from the pool to the bar to your bathtub. Staff the hotel calls "curators" will help you plan excursions into the city, though the attached shopping mall makes it easy to never leave the building at all.

The art here isn't hung on walls to be politely ignored; it's built to be touched, sat in, and argued about, which sets the mood for the whole hotel. MGM Shanghai West Bund sits on the Huangpu River promenade in the West Bund, a former industrial waterfront that traded its wharves for galleries and AI startups. A Forbes Four Star property, it has 219 rooms and a spa, and the neighborhood makes it easy to stay busy without trying.

The concierge who once caught a flight to Hong Kong for a guest's cigars sets the tone at this Forbes Four Star hotel in Jing'an. Ritz-Carlton service in one of Shanghai's most walkable neighborhoods means Nanjing Road shopping, street food, and an acrobatic theatre in the attached Shanghai Centre are all within easy reach. The kind of place where you ask the concierge before you google anything.

A glass tower rising over Lianhua Park, this Forbes Four Star hotel keeps things surprisingly calm for a property planted in Xiamen's commercial core. AB Concept's interiors pile on the botanical details beneath double-height ceilings, and the fifth-floor terrace has a pool that seems designed specifically to be photographed. Wall-to-wall windows throughout mean you're never far from the skyline, whether you want to be or not.

Floors 30 through 59 of the Jing An Kerry Centre, which means the lobby's wall-of-water feature is technically closer to the clouds than to the street. This is a luxury hotel in the Shangri-La mold, so more is always more: marble bathrooms with heated floors, floor-to-ceiling windows, suites with silver mosaic walls and Bulgari products. The lap pool sits under a sky dome, and the 55th-floor lounge turns Shanghai's skyline into wallpaper.

Floors 36 to 48 of a downtown tower, which means the skyline views start before you've even unpacked. This Forbes Four Star hotel runs 287 rooms with dark wood floors and jet tubs, and the design works in latticework and calligraphy-inspired details without tipping into theme-park territory. The onsite garden grows actual vegetables for the kitchen, a small fact that lands differently once you've seen how high up you are.

The sky lobby is on the 62nd floor, which sets the tone for this luxury hotel perched atop Changsha's tallest tower inside the IFS complex. Conran and Partners worked Hunan's landscape into the interiors, so the rooms carry sage greens and timber in place of the usual corporate palette. The pool and wellness floor sit high enough to make a spa day feel mildly vertiginous. It holds a Forbes Four Star and a Michelin Key.

The tiered tower looks like a century-old skyscraper that never got the memo about going bigger, which turns out to be a compliment in a city of glass giants. This Jing'an hotel layers contemporary Chinese art over an interior that somehow reads both postmodern and classically Shanghainese without the identity crisis. THE ONE Restaurant & Bar handles meals with a roving international menu, and the central location keeps the whole city within reach.

Thirty acres of beachfront palms on Hainan Island, closer to Vietnam than to Shanghai, where the Mandarin Oriental traded its usual city-tower format for a sprawling low-rise resort along Coral Bay. Rooms come with balconies, villas sit right on the beach, and the spa village is large enough to get genuinely lost in, which seems to be the point. Bill Bensley designed it, and the warm wood and open-air architecture feel right for a place that holds a Forbes Four Star.

A golf resort on Hainan Island sitting inside Mission Hills, one of the largest golf complexes on earth, with ten championship courses rolling across volcanic terrain outside every window. The rooms and villas lean into the clubhouse fantasy: dark paneling, leather, tartan, marble. The spa runs on local volcanic mineral springs, and the rooftop bar on the 20th floor is a solid reason to put the clubs away for the evening. Forbes Four Star.

A man-made private ocean sits at the center of this sprawling Hainan Island resort, which is exactly the kind of sentence that sounds like marketing copy until you see it. The Sanya Edition spreads across fifty acres of waterfront, with gondolas ferrying guests to a floating restaurant, lotus pools in the lobby, and over five hundred rooms all facing the sea. Forbes Four Star. Pack light; the dress code is essentially "near water at all times."

The lobby chandelier is modeled on a dress Caroline Astor once wore to one of her legendary late-night parties, which tells you where this hotel's head is at. Floors 58 through 78 of the Haitian Center above Fushan Bay, the St. Regis Qingdao has the full complement: butler service, a spa, Cantonese seafood at Yan Ting, and a Bloody Mary spiked with Qingdao beer and local clams. It holds a Forbes Four Star.

The name sets expectations that the address quietly overturns: this InterContinental is not a tower above the skyline but a century-old estate, gardens and all, that once served as the State Guest House. European-style buildings sit amid parkland that most Shanghai hotels would trade their infinity pools for. The rooms and spa are as polished as any in the chain; guests just happen to fall asleep somewhere that feels nothing like a hotel.

Kempinski The One Suites skips hotel rooms entirely, offering only suites, some with kitchenettes, others with full kitchens for something closer to a residential stay. The Deco-influenced décor and generous bathrooms lean polished without tipping into cold, and the building sits above Jing'an within easy range of decent retail and nightlife. A Noevir spa, pool, gym, and a terrace cocktail bar fill out the hours between checkout and the inevitable rescheduling of checkout.

A business hotel in Zhujiang New Town where the automated lighting and climate control share space with ink-wash art and traditionally Chinese interiors, which is a stranger pairing than it sounds and somehow works. Rooms run generous, suites more so, and both Chinese and European dining are on offer. The Guangdong Museum is a ten-minute walk, making it easy to feel cultured before returning to a room that adjusts itself without being asked.

The top-floor Char Bar has views of the Pudong skyline that make the room feel like a screensaver, except you're holding a drink. This design-forward boutique hotel on the Bund pairs high-end rooms with interiors that swing hard between ancient Chinese motifs and bold contemporary color, which could easily go wrong and mostly doesn't. Many rooms look out over the Huangpu River, and the riverside café downstairs gives you the same view at breakfast.

Rooms begin on the 50th floor, which means Canton Tower and Zhujiang New Town fill the windows like a slow-rotating screensaver you actually want to look at. This luxury hotel in Tianhe District pulls Tang Dynasty design references into its bones without making the corridors feel like a museum. Marble bathrooms, Illy machines, Dyson hairdryers. Chinserie handles French brasserie duty; Ting Hotpot does tableside broths. K11 art mall is a direct underground walk away.

The lobby's floating crystal centerpiece is built around Shanghai's official flower, the magnolia, and that single decision tells you everything about how this luxury hotel thinks. Rooms face either the historic Bund embankment or the Pudong skyline, and the dining options run from a glass-bloomed Chinese restaurant to an all-day room styled, apparently without irony, after The Wizard of Oz.

Marble columns inside, Pearl River New City's glass skyline outside, and the gap between those two things is basically the whole design philosophy here. This luxury hotel occupies the upper floors of a distinctive tower, where European finishes meet Chinese detailing throughout. The rooms are exactly what a Ritz-Carlton promises, and the Cantonese restaurant Lai Heen has been a local fixture long enough that Guangzhou residents claim it as their own.