Amanyangyun

In 2002 a young entrepreneur from Jiangxi province, Ma Dadong, heard that a reservoir would flood a valley near Fuzhou, his home town, taking with it villages of Ming and Qing dynasty houses and a forest of old camphor trees. He bought the houses and the trees, numbered every beam and dug up every tree, and moved them 700 kilometres east to a site on the outskirts of Shanghai. Fifteen years later that site opened as Amanyangyun, in the Minhang district of the city.

History

The rescue took the better part of a decade and the planning of the hotel most of another. Some ten thousand camphor trees, several of them a thousand years old, were replanted in a nursery at Maqiao, and 50 houses were taken apart stone by stone and stored. Aman and Kerry Hill Architects joined the project in the 2010s and the resort opened on 8 January 2018, with its name combining "aman" with "yangyun", nourishing cloud. The houses were given a second life as villas and as the rooms of the cultural centre; the trees now shade the paths between them.

Architecture and design

Kerry Hill designed the new buildings in the manner of the old. The Ming Courtyard Suites, built new, follow the plan of the traditional southern Chinese house, with walled courtyards, grey brick, timber screens and a pool or garden at the centre. The Antique Villas are the original houses from Jiangxi, with their carved stone doorframes, timber columns and interior courtyards, rebuilt with modern bathrooms and kitchens. At the heart of the resort stands Nan Shufang, the cultural centre, a reconstruction of a scholar's study where guests take lessons in calligraphy, the guqin, tea and incense in rooms made from the old houses. Water courts and the camphor forest tie the parts together, and the whole estate is walled like the villages it came from.

Rooms and suites

There are 47 keys: 24 Ming Courtyard Suites, each with a private courtyard, and 13 Antique Villas of four bedrooms with their own courtyards, pools and kitchens, plus the larger houses within the villa group. The suites have king beds, deep stone bathtubs and a sitting area opening onto the court; the villas are let whole and come with a butler.

Dining

Lazhu is the Chinese restaurant, with Jiangxi and Cantonese dishes and a set of private dining rooms. Arva, the Italian restaurant, cooks over a wood fire. The Nama Japanese restaurant serves washoku and has a counter, and a tea house and a bar in the cultural centre complete the list. The resort grows some of its own vegetables.

Wellness

The Aman Spa is one of the largest in the group, at around 2,800 square metres, with treatment suites, a Russian banya, a Turkish hammam, a gym, a heated indoor pool and an outdoor pool among the trees. Traditional Chinese medicine is part of the programme, and the camphor forest is used for walks and outdoor practice.

Weddings and events

Amanyangyun hosts weddings in the courtyards and gardens, where the antique houses give the setting, and in a ballroom built for the purpose; Chinese weddings with a tea ceremony are common, and Western ceremonies take place on the lawns. The hotel does not publish capacities for the rooms, but the villa courtyards and the private dining rooms of Lazhu serve parties of modest size, and the resort can be taken in full. Company meetings use the ballroom and the cultural centre.

Location

The resort lies in Maqiao, in the Minhang district, on the south-western edge of Shanghai, about 45 minutes by car from the Bund and the city centre, 30 minutes from Hongqiao airport and railway station, and about an hour and a quarter from Pudong International Airport. The water town of Zhujiajiao and the gardens of Songjiang are nearby. Among luxury hotels in Shanghai it is the only one that is a resort in a forest rather than a tower, and the one where the forest itself was moved to meet the guests.