Park Hyatt Ningbo Resort and Spa

Less than three hours’ drive from Shanghai is the mountain resort of Dong Qian Lake — call it Lake Tahoe to Shanghai’s San Francisco, or Lake Placid to Shanghai’s New York. Then again, it doesn’t really compare to those places, in one important respect: neither Lake Tahoe nor Lake Placid has anything like the Park Hyatt Ningbo Resort and Spa. In a few short years, this hotel has amassed a reputation as one of the best of the thirty-odd Park Hyatts; and this, need we remind you, is a group whose bad days are better than many hotel chains’ most successful efforts.

It was the first Park Hyatt in China, but there’s nothing tentative about it. It’s arranged like a village along the shore of the lake, a sprawling cluster of pavilions and villas, erected in a classically influenced contemporary Chinese style. The Standard rooms — the Park Hyatt, thankfully, hasn’t succumbed to the room-category inflation that makes every room “superior” at the very least — are large and lavish for most purposes, though if you can swing a View or a Deluxe you won’t go wrong. Meanwhile the suites are downright extravagant, with seemingly acres of space, and the villas are the stuff of hospitality fantasies.

The fixtures and furnishings are predictably first-rate, and the service, an area where mainland China still lags ever so slightly behind the rest of the Asian luxury market, is quite up to the usual Park Hyatt standard — which, as you’ll know, is a high standard indeed. Also highly rated: the restaurants, one of which specializes in local seafood and regional flavors, and the spa, which draws heavily on traditional Chinese medicine.