For China’s high-end hotels and shops, past is a form of luxury

In a sun-dappled room on the outskirts of Shanghai, China’s Ming dynasty is alive and well. As my host, Jonathan Wolfberg, pours a cup of carefully aged pu’er tea from a Jingdezhen pot, all is quiet except for the gentle recorded pluck of a guqin, the seven-string wooden instrument once favored by Confucius. We’re sitting at a table made with smooth, golden nanmu wood from Sichuan, which was the wood of choice for Imperial palaces.

In adjacent rooms, I can take a calligraphy class, enjoy an incense ceremony or learn to paint a bamboo stalk using traditional brush painting. And I won’t have to take the exam that the Imperial gentlemen scholars had to pass, which didn’t just include literature and mathematics, but also horse-riding, archery and martial arts.

Wolfberg is the Sinophile American manager of Nan Shufang, a cultural center built around an ancient Qing dynasty villa and part of the lush new Amanyangyun resort, about an hour’s drive southwest of the Bund.

Designed around a recreated 17th-century scholar’s studio, it’s as pure an expression as you’ll find of a movement that is taking China by a very peaceful storm.

“As China has grown more prosperous, there has been a growing appreciation of Chinese history, and the past as a form of luxury,” says Wolfberg, as he pours another tea into a tiny ceramic cup. “The Chinese elite had very refined tastes and cultures that were ahead of their time, and the new elite are starting to rediscover that, too.”

Amanyangyun and Nan Shufang’s journey began with the threat of bulldozers. In 2002, 29-year-old real estate entrepreneur, Ma Dadong, went home to see his parents in Fuzhou City, looking forward to spicy food and swimming in the lake near his family home.

Instead, he heard about plans for a new reservoir, which would submerge a series of villages nearby that were up to 500 years old, and thousands of even older camphor trees, which many villagers worshipped as deities. “The trees and buildings were precious,” Ma says. “And they were just being destroyed. I had to do something.”

Ma told Aman Resorts about his plan to save a piece of Chinese history, and it involved moving 50 ornate stone Ming- and Qing-era dwellings plus more than 10,000 trees. Ma hired a team of botanists and ancient architecture experts for the painstaking process of trimming trees and recording every brick, before loading them on trucks to be driven about 720km northeast to warehouses in Shanghai.

The Chinese elite had very refined tastes and cultures that were ahead of their time, and the new elite are starting to rediscover that, too

One of the timber experts Ma worked with told him about nanmu, a Sichuanese wood that was close to extinction. Despite being the wood of Imperial palaces, it had also been used for a few farm houses. Ma started collecting, finding nanmu wherever he could, even dredging up fossilized bog wood from riverbeds. By 2006, he’d collected enough nanmu to start creating, enlisting furniture experts like Zhang Dexiang and American collector Curtis Evarts to come up with Ming designs that could be recreated using this fine recycled wood. Their first piece was an ornate incense table, made by master craftspeople the old way, using ingeniously interlocking pieces of wood so that no glue or nails were needed.

Today, these nanmu furniture pieces are proudly displayed in Nan Shufang in Amanyangyun, as well as Nan Shufang’s two other centers in Beijing and a branch in Xintiandi, Shanghai’s upscale shopping and entertainment area. The centers operate as furniture showrooms and private members’ clubs for wealthy Chinese wanting to live and learn like the ancient literati.

More than 15 years since Ma’s fated trip to Fuzhou City, 14 of the old villas form the soul of the Amanyangyun, where a previously unloved corner of Minhang district has become a gorgeous Zen retreat, designed by Australian architecture firm Kerry Hill.

The firm added windows and insulation, and private swimming pools and courtyards to the villas, inspired by the architecture of the Suzhou water town near Shanghai.

Another 12 of Ma’s rescued buildings were turned into the Aman Residences – private residences each with their own gallery space, IMAX cinema and temperature-controlled wine cellar. The bricks and beams of the rest are still in a warehouse in Shanghai. The design element that pulls the entire resort together are the well-manicured camphor trees, some up to 1,800 years old – and Ma’s team have also planted a vast camphor forest by the resort.

CHINA BOASTS ONE OF THE LONGEST continuous cultures on Earth, dating back to 1250BC. But it has had a fraught relationship with its past, including the Imperial dynasties that lasted from the Qin in 221BC to the final throes of the Qing empire, in 1912. The Communists under Mao waged war on China’s history, culminating in the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966 with the party newspaper urging China to “clear away the evil habits of the old society”. Imperialism became a dirty word as teachers and academics were attacked, books were burned and any sign of the bourgeoisie was destroyed.

Under Mao’s successor, Deng Xiaoping, market-driven ideology was welded onto Communism as China rushed towards modernization and urbanization. But as the country has grown to become a global economic superpower, there’s been a cultural cost.

Between 2003 and 2010, almost a million villages were destroyed as people moved en masse to cities. At the same time, Beijing saw 4.43 million square meters of old courtyards demolished between 1990 and 2010. For much of the 1990s and noughties, skyscrapers and global brands were king, as China scrambled to catch up with the West, culturally and economically.

In recent years, though, there’s been a quiet counter-movement to reclaim the past, spearheaded by real estate developers, architects and designers.

BACK IN DOWNTOWN SHANGHAI, in the upscale shopping and entertainment area of Xintiandi, the streets are lined with 19th-century shikumen buildings. The architectural style, which blended Chinese and Western design elements, first appeared in Shanghai in the 1860s and grew to become the city’s dominant style of housing, with more than 9,000 buildings by the 1930s.

In contemporary times, these buildings house sleek luxury fashion brands and trendy cafés. In one red-brick building is Shang Xia, a boutique done out like a white minimalist cave, filled with contemporary fashion and objets d’art inspired by the past: think 100% cashmere Mao suits, crystal jewelry reminiscent of Qing dynasty snuff boxes or chairs resembling Ming designs but made with carbon fiber.

Shang Xia is the brainchild of Jiang Qiong’er, a Shanghai-born designer and entrepreneur, who went to French luxury giant  Hermès in 2008 with a concept of a wholly Chinese homeware and clothing brand that took its cues from the past but gave them a modern twist. The name of the brand, which was launched in 2010, means “up and down”, but it signals balance: yin and yang, day and night, tradition and modernity.

“Just 15 years ago, it was hard to find Chinese Imperial heritage outside of museums,” says Jiang. “We wanted to take all that heritage, that craftsmanship, out of the museum, and give these beautiful treasures a new function.”

Shang Xia now has six beautifully curated stores, including a Kengo Kuma-designed boutique in Paris. All are filled with objects scoured from Chinese history and repurposed: Han dynasty dresses (“so pure, so timeless,” says Jiang), elegant Song dynasty porcelain and minimalist Ming-inspired furniture. “People want quality, creativity and taste, and there’s a growing appreciation for real craftsmanship, which is something that can’t be faked.”

For a long time, people looked at China and thought: counterfeit products, no heritage, no creativity. That’s changed so fast

Shang Xia is also part of a wider trend, she says, pointing not just to government programs that give financial support to traditional craftspeople, but the fact that sites like factory retail giant Alibaba now has whole sections devoted to Chinese craft.

“In the last five years, we’ve seen this real revival of our culture,” Jiang says. “For a long time, people looked at China and thought: counterfeit products, no heritage, no creativity. That’s changed so fast.”

She adds that younger generations are starting to look back at the past. “They’re also more creative, and free: They’ll drink tea and coffee, combine East and West, and luxury with high street or vintage. They might pair a fine Shang Xia scarf paired with grandma’s old T-shirt.”

ANOTHER ESTABLISHMENT intent on preserving and retelling history is the Capella Hotel, Jian Ye Li, which opened in late 2017. Located on the western edge of Shanghai’s leafy French Concession, the luxury hotel is set in the 43,000m2 Jian Ye Li estate, the city’s last cluster of traditional laneways and shikumen-style homes, which housed wealthy traders and expats in the 1930s, before becoming a more classic local residence after World War II.

It took a high-end commercial venture to save Jian Ye Li from going the way of other laneways, which have too often been bulldozed to make way for modern high-rises.

Like the Amanyangyun on the outskirts of the city, the Capella is a haven of calm off Jianguo Lu. Just off the main courtyard – with its vine-covered red-brick walls – a series of tight alleys house 55 heritage villas, all set over four floors with little rooftop terraces and French-Chinese interiors designed by Singapore-based BLINK design group.

“We wanted the villas to feel like real homes,” says BLINK co-CEO Clint Nagata. “We wanted to fuse traditional French and Chinese design elements to evoke the 1930s.” Indeed, the rooms feel like they could be the setting for an Ang Lee or a Wong Kar-wai period drama, with mahogany screens, silk wallpaper, traditional Chinese art and White Rabbit sweets in jars; but also old French-style furniture, from metal-legged tables to button-upholstered headboards.

BLINK also worked on the heritage-focused Amanfayun resort in Hangzhou, two hours southwest, and Nagata says that more and more Chinese projects are focusing on the past. “Ten years ago, they might have torn it down and put up a high-rise,” he says. “Now, the Chinese are appreciating their own culture more, and guests increasingly want experiences that have a real sense of place.”

At the Capella, that place is Shanghai in the roaring 1930s. And, just like the China of the Ming, Song or Yuan dynasties, it’s back in vogue.