ASIA | 2008 BEIJING SUMMER OLYMPICS COUNTDOWN
China's luxe hotels still reaching for 5 stars
The hotels can be stunning, the service less so in a country learning what first-class is all about.
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Tour the Commune by the Great Wall near Beijing, China
Lijiang, China
You are lounging in a warm plunge pool in the garden of a private villa while listening to "The Goldberg Variations." Your robe and slippers are on the floor where you dropped them, right near the giant, pillow-mounded platform bed. You are thinking about having a brie omelet for breakfast, then a spa foot massage or a ginseng facial. You know you won't have to tell the bartender how to mix a dry martini when you order one before dinner.
Are you at the Post Ranch Inn at Big Sur or the Plaza Athénée in Paris?
Not even close.
You are at the Banyan Tree in the mountains of southwestern China, at one of the sophisticated new luxury hotels springing up all over this country. In Beijing alone, several new high-end hotels -- including a Four Seasons and Mandarin Oriental -- are due to open by the start of the Olympics in August.
You used to be able to count the number of China's five-star hotels on five fingers, so the emergence of world-class accommodations here is welcome news for travelers.
China's new luxe lodgings come with all the flourishes: state-of-the-art electronics, exceptional settings, international cuisine, dreamy spas and designer décor. Better still, the rates are sometimes appreciably lower than at such accommodations in the West.
But in other ways, Chinese hotels don't always live up to their stars, partly because the government-sponsored rating system is based on facilities only, neglecting the quality of service.
"There are many five-star hotels in China that would be lucky to achieve a four-star rating in other countries," said Damien Little, a director for the hotel consulting group Horwath HTL in Beijing.
The chief stumbling block has been the dearth of well-trained personnel. "The number of quality staff is limited, owing to the poor level of hospitality schooling in China," said Guy Rubin, Beijing-based managing partner of Imperial Tours, which specializes in luxury trips to China. "Graduates are surprisingly ignorant of the service levels expected of them."
Last spring, wanting to find what luxury means in China, I stayed at some of the highly touted new hotels: the Banyan Tree in Lijiang, the Commune by the Great Wall about 50 miles north of Beijing and the Hotel of Modern Art near Guilin in southern China.
It wasn't exactly a hardship posting, and there were wonderful surprises. But on other occasions, simply asking for a blow dryer caused enough consternation to make me feel like a despotic empress.
BANYAN TREE LIJIANG
There comes a point in almost every trip to China when travelers need a break from guides and tours, when they would give an army of terra-cotta warriors for a cup of freshly brewed coffee, when they don't want to see another indecipherable restaurant menu or spend another night on a hard Chinese bed.
That's when it's time to get to the Banyan Tree Lijiang. Since the hotel opened in 2006, it has provided blissful interludes to many weary road warriors.
Banyan Tree is a small, Singapore-based hotel chain that specializes in flawless service, tasteful hedonism, eco-friendly operations and showcasing extraordinary scenery like that around Lijiang, 120 miles from Yunnan's capital Kunming in the far southwestern corner of China.
Visitors come here to see the mountains and enjoy the culture of the Naxi people, one of China's most colorful ethnic minorities. Naxi arts and crafts are on display in the beautifully preserved old town, a UNESCO World Heritage Site of glacier-fed canals, cobblestone streets, bridges and shop houses.
Modern development is fast claiming the wide, mountain-rimmed valley, so it was wise of Banyan Tree to choose a site in the bucolic farm fields about five miles outside town, near the village of Shuhe. It was once a stop on the ancient Tea Horse Road between central China and Tibet, but now the village is a quieter, miniature Lijiang, 10 minutes on foot down a cedar-lined lane from the Banyan Tree.
Besides strolling and shopping for Naxi crafts in Shuhe, hotel guests can go horseback riding in the foothills or trek in nearby Tiger Leaping Gorge. But, honestly, it's hard to leave the compound once you pass through the peak-roofed portal.
Like the Forbidden City in Beijing, the hotel is symmetrically arranged around a series of ever-widening courtyards that yield to a shop, lounge, bar and the Banyan Tree's two restaurants, one serving elegant Chinese cuisine, the other devoted to contemporary Asian fusion.
Beyond that, a network of canals feeds into a broad reflecting pool fringed by weeping willows. The branches were strung with red lanterns, a breathtaking sight when illuminated at night.
Most of the guests were tourists from the West, Hong Kong and Taiwan able to pay rates -- starting around $500 -- that are high by any standard. Besides the sophisticated, pitch-perfect staff, made up of workers from all over Asia, I saw few other people because each of the hotel's 55 chambers is a supremely private, single-story villa surrounded by its own gray brick wall.
My simple but elegant quarters were decorated with contemporary Chinese fabrics, lamps and furniture. Spring green bamboo brushed against the window behind the bed. To the right the bedroom opened onto a palatial bath with an exposed double tub and dressing area. To the left was a small lounge with a settee built into the wall.
But the room's true glory was the stunning view from the sliding glass window in front of the bed: Jade Dragon Snow Mountain, actually a series of peaks, stretching 20 miles from north to south and topping out at 18,360 feet. Cloud banks stream by its face so fast that watching the mountain is like looking out the window of a speeding train.
I passed a long afternoon that way. I needed nothing else, except that dry martini that arrived at sunset, perfectly shaken, not stirred.
HOTEL OF MODERN ART, GUILIN
The Hotel of Modern Art near the honeymoon capital of Guilin in the steamy-hot, deep south is a loopy diversion from the sometimes-taxing business of sightseeing in China.
It lies at the threshold of a 1,320-acre art park on the swampy plains around Yuzi Mountain, one of the fantastically shaped limestone peaks of Guilin immortalized in classical Chinese painting and poetry. Now the mountain marks Yuzi Paradise, the brainchild of a Taiwanese cemetery tycoon whose legacy is a garden for modern sculpture that's too massive to be shown in most museums.
As the flat swamplands were drained, begonias and agapanthus were planted among the pine trees, lakes were filled and winding paths, just right for bicycles (which can be rented at the hotel), were laid.
A serendipitous collection of contemporary architecture started taking shape. It includes an art center in an overlapping chain of off-kilter steel blocks; public bathrooms in a mound of artsy Chinese boulders; a memorial to the late Taiwanese pop star Teresa Teng; and a hangar-like atelier where Taiwanese artist Ju Ming is casting 1,269 sitting Buddhas for a temple in Taipei and French sculptor Paul-Alexandre Bourieau directs stonecutting for a huge dragon sculpture commissioned by the developer of a new Hong Kong skyscraper.
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