Suzhou Supplement: Better Business Trips in Wuxi
By Tom Carter
The clink of chopstick to champagne glass alerts the New Year’s Eve office party full of foreign businessmen in Shanghai that their CEO has another announcement to make. “Now, onto matters of recreation. We’re taking a field trip to Wuxi this weekend, so phone your families and tell them not to wait up.”
Two hours later in Jiangsu province, their chartered coach pulls into the tree-canopied driveway of the Juna Hubin Hotel. A team of attentive bellhops escorts the well-dressed Westerners into the high-ceilinged lobby of an arching steel-and-glass tower, which bears an uncanny resemblance to a traditional Chinese junk sail.
“Would you prefer to go up to your suites first,” the concierge, fluent in English, asks after check-in, “or enjoy the amenities right off?”
“Let’s see what this Yu Club of yours has to offer,” the CEO, expecting nothing but the best, answers for everyone. “My team looks hungry.”
Seated around a massive 40-person banquet table atop the renowned, 28th floor restaurant, the foreigners ferociously feast on the famous Wuxi spareribs followed by the Hubin Hotel’s signature dishes of whitefish soaked in ginger juice, braised wheat gluten with black mushroom and winter bamboo shoot and steamed white esculent swift’s nest with coconut milk and rose pedals.
Satiated, everyone is left to lounge about for the remainder of the evening. Some prefer the ninth floor Yue Bar to enjoy a live piano performance while sipping on genuine 16 year-old Lagavulin whiskey; others opt for Oriental pampering at the on-site Everlasting Spa; the rest head across the driveway to the exclusive Camphor Club, where a disco dance floor, private karaoke booths and mahjong tables provide the expense-account executives with diversions until dawn.
Meanwhile, the pillar-less, 1,500 square-metre Grand Ballroom beneath the hotel’s west wing hosts a lavish banquet wedding (replete with a mechanised camera crane) attended by over a thousand well-groomed guests toasting to the success of the second generation.
As spectacular as everyone’s Friday night is, none can conceive the natural splendours that await them the next morning. Throwing back the curtains of the wall-to-wall windows in their respective rooms, each guest is met with a million-RMB panoramic view of sunrise over glassy Lihu Lake, a bay of Taihu, the third-largest freshwater lake in China.
After lazing in his lake-view bathtub to literally soak up the sweeping scenery, the CEO joins his employees on the 10th floor Juna Executive Lounge for a breakfast buffet spread of intercontinental fare to discuss the day’s itinerary. The state-of-the-art Meiyuan Conference Room has been reserved for the morning so that the businessmen can close the books on the fiscal year, but after that they are free to wander the hotel’s vast 80,000 square-meter estate, including the historic Liyuan classical Chinese garden, a heated indoor pool and a 115-meter high Ferris wheel in neighbouring Lihu Park.
As dusk approaches, the relaxed Westerners retreat once again to the Camphor Club, where a cosy 2,000-book reading library and what just might be Jiangsu province’s most well-stocked Cuban cigar smoking room preoccupy them until supper.
Less than 150 kilometres outside of Shanghai, yet far removed from any semblance of ‘city’, Wuxi Juna Hubin Hotel’s slightly out-of-the-way location is exactly its main attraction.
Wuxi Juna Hubin Hotel. 1 Huanhu Lu, Binhu District. Tel: (0510) 8510 1888. Web: www.hubinhotel.com
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