Amanyangyun.
Most resort projects build a hotel and decorate it with a story. Amanyangyun is the rare resort where the story preceded the hotel by a decade. In 2002, a 14-year-old camphor forest in Jiangxi province — and the cluster of Ming and Qing-dynasty courtyard houses built among the trees — was scheduled to be flooded by a dam reservoir. A Shanghai businessman named Ma Dadong decided to move the forest and the houses, tree by tree and beam by beam, 700 kilometers across China to a new site outside Shanghai.
The project took 15 years. The resort that grew up around the relocated forest and the reassembled courtyards opened as Amanyangyun in January 2018. It is the most ambitious cultural preservation project ever undertaken by a private resort.
What was saved.
The original site sat in the village of Fuzhou, Jiangxi province, in southeastern China. The forest was a mixed grove of camphor trees, some over a thousand years old, that had grown around a small cluster of merchant courtyard houses built between the late Ming (1500s) and the late Qing (1800s). The houses were architectural specimens of the southern Chinese vernacular — single-story stone-and-timber compounds organized around interior courtyards, with characteristic upturned tile roofs and intricate wood carving.
The Beijing-Fuzhou Reservoir project, approved in the late 1990s and slated for completion by 2010, would have submerged the entire valley. The trees and the houses would have been lost.
Ma Dadong, then in his 40s, bought the rights to relocate them. The trees were dug up one at a time, root balls preserved in earth, wrapped, transported by truck across 700 kilometers, and replanted at the new site in Minhang district outside Shanghai. The houses were disassembled stone by stone, beam by beam, numbered and catalogued, transported, and rebuilt at the new site.
The final count, by the time the project completed: 10,000 camphor trees replanted (some over 1,500 years old), and 50 Ming and Qing-dynasty courtyards reassembled. The relocation cost has been variously reported at $176 million USD over 15 years, before the resort itself was built.
The resort.
Aman partnered with Ma Dadong’s organization to operate a resort on the relocated site. Kerry Hill — the same Australian architect who designed Aman Tokyo before his death in 2018 — designed the resort architecture. His brief was to integrate new accommodation with the preserved historical fabric without overpowering it.
The result: 24 contemporary villas (Hill’s design — clean lines, dark timber, walled gardens, plunge pools) interspersed among the relocated camphor trees, and 13 historical courtyards (renovated, modernized inside while preserving the original exterior architecture) operating as guest accommodation. Total inventory: 47 keys. The contemporary villas range from 280 to 600 square meters. The historical courtyards range from 350 to 800 square meters.
The grounds spread across 25 acres — substantial for a resort in greater Shanghai. The relocated forest forms the spine. Stone-paved paths wind between the trees. The main public spaces — the Aman Spa, the restaurants (Lazhu for Chinese, Arva for Italian), the Nan Shu Fang reading pavilion — are housed in restored historical structures.
The Aman Spa.
The spa is the most ambitious in the Aman portfolio. 2,800 square meters spread across two restored Ming-period courtyards. The treatment program runs Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM) — herbal consultations, acupuncture, cupping, tui na massage, qigong sessions — alongside the standard Aman wellness menu of Watsu, hot stone, and aromatic body treatments.
The TCM Hall is operated by a dedicated team of traditional Chinese medicine practitioners. The lead practitioner, Dr. Liang, holds credentials from the Shanghai University of Traditional Chinese Medicine. The consultation process — pulse reading, tongue diagnostic, herbal prescription — runs in the traditional form. The herbs prescribed are blended on-site from the resort’s herbarium, which contains over 200 distinct dried botanicals sourced from the regional pharmacopeia.
For Western guests unfamiliar with TCM, the recommended entry point is a 90-minute consultation followed by an acupuncture session and a customized herbal tea preparation. The cost runs roughly 3,500 to 6,000 RMB ($480 to $830 USD) for the full sequence. The follow-on treatments — daily acupuncture, tui na, qigong instruction — are added incrementally over the length of a stay.
The standard Aman spa menu (Watsu, hot stone, aromatic body, facial protocols) runs in parallel, in separate treatment rooms within the same complex. The two systems operate side by side and the spa staff handles the transition between them seamlessly.
The food.
Two restaurants anchor the dining program.
Lazhu. Modern Chinese fine dining, with a menu that draws heavily from Jiangsu and Zhejiang province cooking — the regional cuisines closest to where the resort’s relocated forest originally grew. The chef, Tony Lu, is a Shanghai-born chef who trained internationally and returned to specialize in modern interpretations of regional Chinese fare. The tasting menu (9 to 11 courses, roughly 1,800 RMB / $250 USD per person) is the right introduction. Several dishes incorporate seasonal vegetables grown in the resort’s own kitchen garden.
Arva. The Italian restaurant, common to Aman properties worldwide. Wood-fired pizza, fresh pasta, Mediterranean-leaning seafood. The kitchen is competent and the room is pleasant — a good lunch option after a morning at the spa. Not the reason to come to Amanyangyun, but the right move on a longer stay.
Breakfast and lunch can also be taken at the Bamboo Garden — a more casual setting near the resort’s central lake — or in-villa.
What the days look like.
The resort is large enough and quiet enough that the days run on their own logic. Most guests structure a stay around a few anchors.
- A morning qigong session in the bamboo grove (offered daily at 7:30 AM).
- Breakfast in the villa courtyard.
- A morning spa session — either Western or TCM-track.
- Lunch at Arva or the Bamboo Garden.
- An afternoon in the villa — pool, garden, the resort’s small library of Chinese classical books.
- A guided walk through the relocated forest with a resident historian (offered three times weekly).
- Dinner at Lazhu.
The resort discourages excursions in and out of central Shanghai. The 45-minute drive each way breaks the rhythm of the stay. Most guests who arrive at Amanyangyun stay on the property for the full duration and treat the Shanghai sightseeing as a separate, pre- or post-Aman segment of the trip.
The cost.
Entry rates start at 6,500 RMB ($900 USD) per night for a base Ming Courtyard Suite. Contemporary villas run 7,500 to 12,000 RMB ($1,030 to $1,650 USD). The largest historical courtyards (the Antique Villa, two- and three-bedroom configurations) run 18,000 to 40,000 RMB ($2,500 to $5,500 USD) per night. The spa and dining add substantially.
Across a 4-night stay in a base villa with a full TCM program and a single Lazhu dinner, expect total cost around 60,000 to 80,000 RMB ($8,300 to $11,000 USD) before tax. Comparable to or slightly above Aman Tokyo on equivalent stays.
How to book it properly.
Same logic as Aman Tokyo. Virtuoso advisor access produces complimentary breakfast, $100 USD hotel credit, and guaranteed room upgrades on the same room rate. The right move for a Shanghai trip is two nights at the Peninsula or Mandarin Oriental in central Shanghai (for the Bund, the food, the city itself), then three nights at Amanyangyun to decompress before flying home. Reverse the order if Amanyangyun is the trip’s main event.
The right window for Amanyangyun is March to May (after the Shanghai winter, before summer humidity) or October to early December (the autumn camphor leaf color, dry weather). July and August are hot and humid; January and February are cold and the forest is bare.
The category — why Amanyangyun and not Six Senses or COMO Shambhala.
The other obvious wellness anchors in Asia are Six Senses (multiple Thailand, Vietnam, and Indonesia properties), COMO Shambhala in Bali, Amankora across Bhutan, and Ananda in the Himalayas. All credible. All produce strong wellness experiences for their guests.
Amanyangyun wins because it is the only one where the wellness is integrated into a serious cultural preservation project. Six Senses is well-run hospitality. COMO is well-run hospitality. Amanyangyun is well-run hospitality built on top of a 15-year heritage rescue that saved a thousand-year-old camphor forest from being submerged. The wellness work at Amanyangyun draws on Traditional Chinese Medicine practiced in restored Ming courtyards. The guest is participating, even passively, in a cultural continuity project.
That layered context produces a different kind of stay. The Aman spa treatment is excellent. The treatment in a 400-year-old courtyard surrounded by a relocated millennial forest is something else.
For “The Wellness,” Amanyangyun is the answer because it is the property where the setting itself is the treatment.
What Amanyangyun teaches is that the modern Chinese hospitality industry, given enough budget and patience, can preserve cultural heritage at a scale no Western luxury group has yet attempted. Moving 10,000 camphor trees and 50 Ming-period courtyards 700 kilometers is not a marketing campaign. It is a 15-year construction project the size of a small public works program, undertaken by a private operator with the explicit goal of saving a forest.
The trees are the part that stops most guests in their tracks. The camphors at Amanyangyun are not landscaping. They are 1,000-year-old specimens that have been alive longer than most countries the guests have flown in from. The age sits on the property and the property sits on the age. The architecture between them is the negotiation.
What stays after a stay at Amanyangyun is the realization that traditional Chinese medicine, properly practiced, is not a wellness aesthetic. It is a 2,000-year-old medical system being applied by credentialed practitioners with the full diagnostic repertoire — pulse, tongue, herbal blending — in a clinical space that happens to also be a Ming-period courtyard. Most Western luxury wellness is a layer of decoration on a massage. Amanyangyun's TCM hall is a clinic, in a forest, dressed in 400-year-old wood.