Signature Luxury Travel & Style
BEIJING Visit the Great Wall of China during a stay in the city’s elegant grande dame
Cathy Wagstaff savours the culture of China both past and present with a stay at a reborn icon.
It’s night when I arrive at The Peninsula Beijing, stepping out from a signature green BMW and through an elaborate archway once reserved for royalty. The grande dame was the first international luxury hotel to arrive in the capital in 1989 – the high-fashion boutiques soon following – and in June 2016, she revealed a US$123 million renovation, more resplendent than ever.
The lobby is dazzling in its ivory beauty, three storeys high and clad in 3500 pieces of marble. Six colossal pillars with a golden sheen, carved with motifs from the nearby Forbidden City, draw my eyes up to five-metrehigh blue canvases streaked with black, flanking a grand golden staircase.
Instinctively I look around for the check-in desk, only to realise a woman is standing beside me, tablet in hand, already waiting to escort me to my in-room check-in.
The little things
This seems to embody what I love about The Peninsula Hotels. General manager, Vincent Pimont, his impeccable team and designer, Henry Leung, have done everything in their power to build effortlessness into the hotel’s fabric.
More than anything, it’s in the service. Pimont tells me of a guest in town for a string of meetings. The housekeeper noticed the guest had run out of hand cream, so she had it replaced. As Pimont says, these things don’t come from management; they come from the staff who care. “It’s the little things,” he says.
During the renovation, the number of rooms was reduced from 525 to just 230 ‘suite-style’ rooms, averaging 65 square metres, and among the largest in the country. Upon opening the door of my Premier Suite, I can see those touches, from the valet box to have laundry picked up and delivered to your room, to the nail dryer in the walk-in dressing room.
The crisp, white bed features a tablet on either side that controls all light switches, climate and curtains, as well as providing information about dining, spa services and the concierge in 11 languages. It is astonishingly easy and intuitive to use. The whole hotel, and indeed the city, is just a swipe away.
Marvels of Beijing
The Peninsula Academy features spectacular excursions to get guests
closer to Chinese culture, including a helicopter flight over the Great Wall of China, but I’m keen to see it from the ground first. The hotel arranges for Michael Guang to be my guide, a former history teacher whose knowledge and passion about the city keeps him in high demand among Beijing’s five-star establishments.
He takes me to the Badaling section of the fortification, one of three sections open to visitors. We’re just 80 kilometres northwest of the city centre, and this seven-kilometre section of the wall receives an average 110,000 visitors per day.
Michael is well versed in its complex history, including the five centuries it took for the main construction to be completed by one million people. Seeing even just a small part before me, I’m in awe of the human ingenuity that created this modern wonder.
Back at the hotel, I’m confronted with a marvel of a different variety in the form of the Peninsula Spa’s black-tiled pool. The subdued colour is soothing against the white and blue of the deck chairs, and the serenity continues as Gina kneads, rolls and stretches my joints and pressure points in a Chinese Meridian massage.
High tea, flying tea
Tea here is an institution, represented by two bronze brew-sipping sculptures in the lobby where wellcoiffed ladies take time out from their retail therapy to nibble on ribbon sandwiches and scones.
Diners at Huang Ting Cantonese restaurant step into a nobleman’s courtyard, while in its new Tea Lounge, ceremonial masters provide incomparable dinner theatre. They wield long-spouted pots, shooting tea through the air into white china cups with astonishing precision.
At international farm-to-table restaurant, Jing, an abundance of floral motifs creates the feeling of a Chinese garden. The cuisine is as refined as the art: sweet corn soup, black cod, and a chocolate mousse with honey-roasted nut cream and espresso ice-cream. As with everything within The Peninsula Hotels, it’s all about the detail.