The Peninsula Beijing

Goldfish Lane, or Jinyu Hutong, runs east off Wangfujing in the old Dongcheng district, and in 1989 it gained the tallest building it had ever seen. The Palace Hotel opened there that year as a joint venture between The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels and a Chinese partner, one of the first international hotels of its class in the capital after the reforms of the 1980s. It was renamed The Peninsula Palace Beijing and later simply The Peninsula Beijing. In its first life it had 525 rooms. In its second it has 230 suites, and that transformation is the reason to read on.

History

For its first quarter-century the hotel traded on location and on the Peninsula Arcade, a shopping gallery of international fashion houses that occupied its lower floors at a time when such shops had few other addresses in Beijing. Between 2014 and 2017 the owners took the building down to its structure and rebuilt the interiors, cutting the room count by more than half so that every key became a suite. The hotel reopened in stages and completed the work in 2017.

Architecture and design

The exterior is still the 1989 tower, a tall block faced in pale stone with a Chinese-style roof treatment at the top. Inside, the rebuild gave the hotel a new lobby with a tall atrium and the arcade was reorganised below it. The design references are to Beijing rather than to Hong Kong: lattice screens, lacquer, grey brick and the proportions of courtyard houses, applied in a modern register rather than as pastiche.

Rooms and suites

The 230 suites start at 60 square metres, which was the largest entry-level room in Beijing when the hotel reopened. Each has a separate living area, a dressing room and a bathroom with a bath and a separate shower. The Peninsula's bedside tablet controls lighting, curtains and room service, and the larger suites on the upper floors add dining rooms and views west over the rooftops towards the Forbidden City. The Peninsula Suite and the Beijing Suite are the two largest.

Dining

Huang Ting is the hotel's Cantonese restaurant and the one most worth a detour. It was built in the basement as a sequence of rooms modelled on a Beijing courtyard house, with reclaimed grey bricks, carved timber screens and antique furniture, so that the diner sits in a siheyuan rather than a hotel dining room. Jing, on the lobby level, serves Western food and breakfast. The Lobby serves afternoon tea in the Peninsula manner, and there is a bar on the same floor.

Wellness

The Peninsula Spa has treatment rooms and private suites, and the hotel keeps an indoor pool and a fitness centre, both rebuilt with the rest of the house in the 2010s.

Weddings and events

The hotel has a ballroom and a set of function rooms for meetings, dinners and Chinese wedding banquets, with the Wangfujing location making it a usual choice for corporate events in Dongcheng. Weddings follow Beijing custom in using the ballroom for the banquet; the hotel has no garden for outdoor ceremonies.

Location

Wangfujing, the pedestrian shopping street, begins at the end of the lane. The eastern gate of the Forbidden City is about a kilometre and a half to the west, and Tiananmen Square a little further. Wangfujing station on Line 1 of the metro is a short walk away. Beijing Capital airport is roughly 45 minutes to the north-east by car, and Daxing airport, opened in 2019 to the south, is a longer drive. As a luxury hotel in Beijing it has the advantage over the Chaoyang towers of being inside the old city, within walking distance of the sights most visitors come for.