FINE CHINA
A project of epic scope, Amanyangyun is the most remarkable hotel opening of 2018.
A project of epic scope, involving the transplanting of an entire forest, Amanyangyun is the most remarkable hotel opening of 2018. To experience China with Aman, writes PAT NOURSE, is to get a rarefied glimpse of a nation trying to understand itself as both market and muse.
What does luxury mean in China in 2018? The arrival of Aman in Shanghai seemed like the perfect place to start investigating. Where better to look for clues than the biggest opening for the most celebrated resort group in the world in one of China’s richest and fastest growing cities?
China has at various times in history been the pinnacle of human civilisation, a place of unmatched scholarship, wealth and refinement. It’s one of the few civilisations that has thrived continuously since antiquity, its roots stretching back as far as 2000BC.
It has also more recently been the site of one of history’s most devastating cultural catastrophes. In 1966 Mao Zedong instigated the Cultural Revolution with the intention of strengthening the ideology of Chinese communism, reinvigorating the revolution, and eliminating the bourgeois elements he believed had infiltrated the state. He charged the Red Guards, a student paramilitary organisation, with destroying the “four olds”: old ideas, old customs, old habits and old culture. To wear bourgeois clothes was to invite beatings in the street. To be an intellectual was to risk being murdered or driven to suicide. Cats were slaughtered en masse because they were deemed to be a symbol of decadence. Simply having the wrong haircut could get you jailed or killed.
Traditional culture was denounced. Artefacts and relics were confiscated and destroyed. Vases were smashed, scrolls burned, museums ransacked and temples desecrated. One estimate puts the number of antiques seized at 613,600 – and that was in
Beijing alone. The damage caused to the cultural heritage of China as a nation between 1966 and
1976 is incalculable.
In 1981, the Communist Party of China, the nation’s ruling political party, declared that the Cultural Revolution was the most severe setback for the country since the founding of the People’s Republic, and set about reforming the economy.
Money was made and along with it came a private sector and a middle class. China became the largest exporter in the world in 2010, the largest trading nation in 2013, and overtook the US in purchasing power in 2014 to become the world’s largest economy.
Now China has money. Its borders are more porous. China’s rich have been rich enough and mobile enough to take a good hard look over the past 40 years at how the rich in the rest of the world like to spend their money. And, having supercharged the price of Bordeaux, changed the face of European luxury fashion, and customised their Gulfstream 650s, now they’re turning their attention back home.