Advantage Zhuhai

With its diverse industries, leisure resorts, compact size and strategic location near Hong Kong and Macau, this coastal mainland city boasts plenty of drawcards

- Michael Allen

On the 42nd floor of the 330-metre-high Zhuhai Tower, in the reception of the opulent St Regis Zhuhai hotel, an enormous mural occupies an entire wall opposite the reception desks. The mural depicts part of Zhuhai in the early 1900s, showing a beautiful village at the bottom of a verdant hillside. Rong Hong, the first Chinese student to graduate from an American university (Yale), is strolling away from the town and towards the viewer of the painting. Not far behind him, two children can be seen playing. Behind the town, the ocean is filled with sailboats.

This, one of the hotel stafftells me, is what the area surrounding Zhuhai Tower used to look like, but now it’s unrecognisable when compared with the painting. All traces of the village seem to have disappeared, and the area is now being developed by state-owned enterprise Zhuhai Huafa Group. There are three major hotels (including the St Regis) in the vicinity, as well as a huge convention and exhibition centre.

“When I was little, Zhuhai was just a very small city, very few people were here, and I could not see a lot of high buildings. It was just like the countryside, but now it’s quite different, especially in this area,” says Angel Huang, marketing officer at the Zhuhai International Convention & Exhibition Center.

The centre’s largest and most prestigious function room, the 4,500 sqm and 12.6-metre-high Zhuhai Hall, tends to be rented for provincial government functions. Even some large multinationals have balked at the expense of renting out this expansive area, PR officer Lehong Chen tells me during a tour.

The centre occupies a footprint of 269,000 sqm and a gross floor area of around 970,000 sqm (split into two phases). It has recently hosted events including The 3rd China-Israel Investment Summit, Walmart’s New Year Celebration Meeting and a FAW-Volkswagen New Sagitar Press Conference.