The Best Places to Eat and Stay in China

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Dim as the bottom of the East China Sea, this French seafood restaurant in Shanghai's Rockbund sits where Suzhou Creek meets the Huangpu, and the room feels like it knows that. Leather banquettes, travertine walls, and restrained plating frame a menu that shifts with whatever the ocean is offering that season. The chef came up at Odette in Singapore, and the technique shows. It landed on Asia's 50 Best Restaurants list.

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.

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.

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.

A Forbes Five Star hotel rising 41 stories above Tianfu Square, with guest rooms that borrow their bones from traditional Chinese courtyard homes, dressed out in damask, warm wood, and marble with city views. The central business district location puts pandas, teahouses, and spicy Sichuan markets within easy reach, which is a good thing, because a city this charismatic deserves more than a lobby.

The indoor pool sits under a glass enclosure that tricks you into thinking you're outside, which is a neat trick for a luxury hotel in the middle of one of the most densely packed cities on earth. Rooms run large, the lobby runs larger, and personal space is treated less as an amenity than a guiding philosophy. Business travelers use it as a base for the Jing'an commercial district, a short walk away.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

A 400-foot pool stretching toward the South China Sea is the orientation point here, and it sets the tone for everything else at this large luxury beach resort on Hainan Island's southern tip. Rooms are spacious and contemporary, most facing the water, while freestanding villas add private pools and butler service for anyone going full Bond villain. Eight restaurants, five pools, and a Michelin Key round out a property that somehow stays calm despite its scale.

A private island hotel on 22 acres of lake and garden, reached by a short bridge outside Suzhou. The grounds are calibrated to bloom on a seasonal schedule the hotel actually tracks and shares, which is either charming or mildly controlling depending on your mood. An infinity pool hangs over the water; a glass-enclosed one handles the colder months. Suzhou's canal network and its classical gardens are close enough for a day out and back.

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.

Check-in happens on the 14th floor at the Sky Lobby, which tells you exactly what kind of resort Rosewood Sanya is. Perched on Haitang Bay with the South China Sea filling every window, the rooms lean into natural wood and stone rather than shouting about their luxury. Some floors get balcony plunge pools. Three restaurants, two bars, a Sense Spa, and seafront walking trails spread across 40 acres, with the rooftop infinity bar doing steady work at sunset.

A four-sided glass hearth burns at the center of the lobby, lit on every side, which sets the tone for this full-service luxury hotel in Xi'an's business district. Rooms run deep plum with marble baths and jetted tubs, the spa occupies an entire floor with a Zen garden alongside, and the rooftop bar, Flair, closes out the night above a city that still has Terracotta Warriors in the ground nearby.

The angular glass facade was designed to echo the fractured ice sheets that cover the Songhua River below each winter, which tells you everything about how seriously Harbin takes its signature season. This luxury hotel leans into that identity throughout, with sculptural chandeliers, swirling blue artwork, and Russian lace details nodding to the city's tsarist-era past. All 366 rooms face the river or skyline, and every bathroom has a soaking tub.

Floor-to-ceiling bay views, marble that catches every angle of the South China Sea light, and a butler's service window in every room set the tone at this beachfront St. Regis resort on Hainan's southern tip. The property cloisters you completely, with private pools, beach massages, yacht services, and four restaurants covering everything from Cantonese to fresh seafood. The Drawing Room does a nightly champagne-sabering ritual, in case you needed permission to stay another night.

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.

A wave sculpture runs the full length of the ceiling, which tells you something about how seriously this place takes its own idea. Chao Yue is a fine-dining Chaozhou restaurant where the kitchen reinterprets Chiu Chow culinary tradition through prix fixe menus built to feel like a single continuous argument. The service is unusually considered, and the room is quiet enough that it actually matters.

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.