Top of the top.
Destination Southeastern China (Hong Kong, Macau and Guagzhou) by Francois Jobard.
I enjoyed Guangzhou, the capital and largest city in southeastern China.
We stayed in the Four Seasons Hotel. A hotel with a view.
The best ones can be enjoyed from the restaurant located at the 100th floor as well as from the bar at the 99th floor, alongside the Executive Club lounge with its staircase, cantilevered over the atrium, connecting the two aforementioned storeys. The designers have artistically placed a carefully picked collection of sculptures, prints and paintings throughout the luxurious hotel, originating from international contemporary artists. They highlight the strong sense of modernism which guests can feel upon arrival.
The hotel occupies the top third of the 103-storey Guangzhou IFC, one of the world’s tallest skyscrapers. In a year when Four Seasons opened hotels in China’s three major cities, Guangzhou has trumped Shanghai and Beijing for sheer spectacle. With a lobby on the 70th floor and the rest of the hotel even higher up the vertiginous Guangzhou IFC Tower, there are stunning views of the Pearl River Delta and Canton Tower from all of the bedrooms.
We were curious to make it to the top of the Guangzhou International Finance Center in China and found the luxurious, final completion of the 440 m high building, a stalwart skyscraper penned down by Wilkinson Eyre Architects together with the engineers at Arup.
The building sums up at 103 storeys, and, due to its location, above the Pearl River, it provides staggeringly breathtaking panoramas.
It is designed around a full-height atrium, the atrium itself is taller than New York’s Statue of Liberty and London’s St. Paul Cathedral. Wow.
The bedrooms are caramel and cranberry-coloured and hung with contemporary Chinese ink paintings; the bathrooms are lined with white-veined, light-chocolate marble.
And it’s not all about elegance and panoramas, it’s also about relaxation, having a great time and, most importantly, chilling out. The hotel provides a fully endowed spa, an infinity pool with breathtaking views of the city, fitness centres, an Italian café and dining areas, where guests are able to enjoy seafood, Cantonese, Japanese and all sorts of international dishes. There are also spaces for social occasions, conferences, weddings or other sorts of events, in the shape of three formal ballrooms.
A highlight of any visit to Guangzhou is the local food, and the hotel’s opulent Yu Yue Heen restaurant serves wonderful ducks, wan tangs and roast goose with plum sauce, double-boiled bird’s-nest soup and dim sum.
Located on the Pearl River nearby Hong Kong and 145 km north of Macau, Guangzhou was a major point of the maritime Silk Road and continues to serve as a major port and transportation hub.
It is the 3rd-largest Chinese city, behind Beijing and Shanghai, holds sub-provincial administrative status, and is accounted one of China’s five National Central Cities. In 2014 the city’s administrative area was estimated to have a population of 13,080,500 and forms part of one of the most populous metropolitan agglomerations on Earth. Some estimates place the population of the built-up area of the Pearl River Delta Mega City as high as 44 million without the Hong Kong SAR and 54 million including it. Guangzhou is identified as a Beta+ Global city. In recent years, there has been a rapidly increasing number of foreign residents and illegal immigrants from the Middle East, Eastern Europe and Southeast Asia, as well as from Africa. This has led to it being dubbed the “Capital of the Third World”. The migrant population from other provinces of China in Guangzhou was 40 percent of the city’s total population in 2008. Most of them are rural migrants and they speak only Mandarin. They have taken on many jobs that the local citizens are unwilling to do.
Guangzhou was long the only Chinese port permitted for most foreign traders. The city proper fell to the British and was opened by the First Opium War. It lost trade to other ports such as Hong Kong and Shanghai, but continued to serve as a major entrepôt. In modern commerce, Guangzhou is best known for its annual Canton Fair, the oldest, highest-level, largest-scale and most complete trade fair in China. For the three consecutive years 2013–2015, Forbes ranked Guangzhou as the best commercial city on the Chinese mainland.
You will find 344 luxurious guest rooms and suites, some of the largest, most elegant and most modern throughout Guangzhou.
The pinnacles of some of the interior spaces, like the fantastic bathroom.
Furthermore the ceiling-high windows, which allow both an ample flooding of natural light and superb views. Even the atrium balconies were gorgeously sculpted in order to remind of the overall “diagrid” structural shape of the building, when viewed from the atrium.
In order to reach the hotel, guests are provided with dedicated express lifts which carry them from the ground floor lobby directly to the 70th Floor sky lobby. Here, they’re greeted by both the stunning atrium views and the panoramas over the Pearl River. If these weren’t enough, guests’ heads are being illuminated by a dramatic natural roof light, originating from 120 meters above.
All in all, the luxury Four Seasons Hotel in Guangzhou is just fantastic.
Its worth it, even in competitive China, the Four Seasons Guangzhou is a fantastic hotel.
