Aman Summer Palace

A small door in the wall of Aman Summer Palace opens straight into the grounds of the Summer Palace, the imperial park of the Qing emperors in the north-west of Beijing, and hotel guests use it before the public gates open and after they close. The hotel occupies a cluster of courtyard buildings beside the east gate of the palace, built in the late nineteenth century and converted by Aman in 2008.

History

The Summer Palace, Yiheyuan, was rebuilt by the Empress Dowager Cixi in the 1880s after its destruction by Anglo-French troops in 1860, and it was from here that she governed China through the last decades of the dynasty. The buildings beside the east gate housed guests and officials waiting to be summoned to an audience. They passed through the twentieth century as housing and offices, and in the 2000s Aman took a lease on them and restored the courtyards, adding new buildings in the same manner at the back of the site. The hotel opened in 2008, in the year of the Beijing Olympic Games, as Aman's first hotel in China. UNESCO had listed the Summer Palace in 1998.

Architecture and design

The plan is a sequence of walled courtyards, siheyuan, with grey-tiled roofs, red columns, lattice windows and painted beams in the Qing style. The oldest pavilions hold the reception, the lounges and the restaurants, with their original timber frames restored; the guest pavilions in the new courtyards behind repeat the proportions in new construction. Jean-Michel Gathy of Denniston designed the interiors with Ming-style furniture, dark lacquer, bamboo and silk, keeping the rooms spare. A cinema, a library and a games room with a billiard table occupy pavilions of their own, and the spa was built underground beneath a courtyard to keep the skyline of the roofs unbroken.

Rooms and suites

There are 51 rooms and suites, arranged around the courtyards. Each has a high ceiling of exposed beams, a platform bed, a bathroom in stone and a view of a courtyard or garden; the suites add sitting rooms and, in the largest, a private courtyard. The Imperial Suite, in one of the original pavilions, is the largest.

Dining

Naoki is the Japanese restaurant, with a French-influenced kaiseki menu, and the Chinese restaurant serves Beijing and Cantonese cooking, including Peking duck, in the old pavilions. The Grill serves Western dishes, and a lounge and a bar in the reception courtyard take afternoon tea and drinks. Private dinners are set up in the courtyards and in the restaurant's private rooms.

Wellness

The Aman Spa, below ground, has treatment rooms, a 25-metre indoor pool under a vaulted ceiling, a gym, Pilates and yoga studios, and traditional Chinese medicine consultations. Squash and a cinema are part of the same wing. Walks into the Summer Palace by the private door, before the park opens to the public, are the hotel's main offer to its guests.

Weddings and events

The hotel hosts weddings and private events in its courtyards and in a ballroom built within the new wing, with Chinese ceremonies in the old pavilions and Western ones in the gardens. No fixed capacities are published; the courtyards take receptions of modest size, and the whole hotel can be reserved. Company meetings use the ballroom and the private rooms of the restaurants, and the hotel is near the universities and the technology district of Haidian.

Location

The hotel stands at 1 Gongmenqian Street, beside the east gate of the Summer Palace in Haidian district, in the north-west of Beijing. The city centre and the Forbidden City are about 40 minutes by car, and the Old Summer Palace, Yuanmingyuan, and the universities of Tsinghua and Peking are close by. Beijing Capital International Airport is about 45 minutes to an hour away, and Daxing airport about an hour and a half. Among the luxury hotels in Beijing, this is the only one with a door of its own into the imperial park, and the only one where the roofs of the hotel match those of the palace next door.