A Moving Tribute

Aman’s hotels have never failed to impress, but its first Shanghai property raises the bar. Amanyangyun not only involved the reconstruction of a historic village, it also saw the relocation of a forest some 700km from where it originally was.

- Justina Tan

While all Aman properties share a similar DNA – off the beaten track, surrounded by virgin nature, and expositing discreet luxury with a deep respect for the locale’s culture – only one can boast the staggering relocation of a camphor forest and the stone-by-stone disassembly (and subsequent rebuilding) of 50 Ming and Qing Dynasty village buildings from Jiangxi province to 10 hectares of land on the outskirts of Shanghai.

Monumental marvel

Freshly minted this January, Amanyangyun has a romantic backstory to match its peaceful, refined spaces. In 2002, a young Chinese real estate entrepreneur, Ma Dadong, returned to his childhood home in Jiangxi, only to discover that his hometown and the surrounding forest would soon be lost to the construction of a dam. To save his cultural heritage from a watery fate, Ma set plans afoot to uproot the camphor trees and break down centuries-old Chinese residences, and transport them to Shanghai.

It was a massive undertaking that took no less than a decade. According to Amanyangyun’s general manager Benoit Amado, there were approximately 100,000 stones used in each of the 50 ancient Jiangxi homes. Each home was disassembled stone by stone and beam by beam; every piece was then catalogued and stored. Even doors, walls and windows of the original homes were salvaged. Each of the 26 antique villas and residences that now make up Amanyangyun took three years or more to reconstruct, thanks to painstaking restoration of these salvaged parts by skilled artisans.