Experience holistic wellness and chakra balancing at Surya Hotel Shanghai New Hongqiao Center. Discover Ayurvedic treatments, sound therapy, and thermal rooms.
Tags:By Mike Norton
So I came to this new hotel beside Hongqiao Airport out of curiosity more than conviction. However, 11 minutes after walking in, with my hand resting on a small device in reception, a wellness expert studied the screen and told me my aura was of the Ayurvedic Pitta—or fire—constitution.
This represents competitiveness, vitality, excitement, passion, and willpower... but also signifies that I might be under some stress.
Time to get on board.
What follows is not really a hotel stay; it is a journey. Surya is the newest brand from the Anandi Group, which has been in the Chinese healing-hotel business long enough to be considered expert, and the concept here is Indian wellness therapy—in the treatments, the experiences, everything.
The name is Sanskrit for the sun. Even the setting, unlikely as it sounds, is part of the effect: you are around the corner from the National Exhibition and Convention Center and almost underneath the Hongqiao flight path, in a neighborhood whose usual spiritual high point is a trade fair.
Find stillness here and you can find it anywhere.
The journey begins with the consultation and assessment, before the room key has properly warmed in your pocket.
My fire chakra, as we have established, suggested I needed to de-stress—and the therapists set about correcting it with a program of carefully tailored workshops and rituals.
Mine, the expert suggested, could do with sound. So the first stage led to the Energy Space: a Zen-like room where floor cushions are arranged in a circle around a gathering of brass singing bowls and a gong the size of a car tire.
The timetable there runs morning to night under five headings—breath, sleep, stillness, movement, healing—supplemented with singing bowl shows in the lobby, sound healing, and meditation.
At 8.50pm there is a Deep Sleep Workshop, the first hotel activity I have come across that schedules you for unconsciousness.
I was advised to try sound bed therapy to while away my stress. You lie on a bed. Beneath the bed, a practitioner strums strings. Low-frequency sound waves pass through your body. That is it.
I lay there in the dim room fully prepared to feel foolish, and instead felt something in my shoulders unclench—not the way a massage works out a knot, but the way a breath you did not know you were holding finally goes out.
I could not tell you what it did to my aura. What I do know is that I did not want to get up, and that the walk back upstairs felt like I was walking on clouds.
It is downstairs that the Ayurvedic thinking is made manifest. Alongside the heated pool, the hot and cold plunge pools, and the steam room sit three thermal rooms, each with a different proposition.
The jade and agate room is the slowest of them: jade conducts heat poorly, so it warms gradually and then gives that warmth back evenly, which is why the Chinese tradition treats it as a stone of longevity and steady circulation rather than a quick sweat.
The ginseng and reishi room runs the opposite proposition, and the pairing is the point: ginseng is the classic tonic for energy and recovery; reishi, the mushroom traditionally used to settle the nervous system and sleep.
So you are balancing two arguments at once.
Then the Himalayan salt room, where walls and floor glow amber—the pink is iron oxide—which is halotherapy: salt-laden air, the old remedy for blocked sinuses and stubborn winter lungs.
My sinuses on the way out were clearer than they had been all autumn. I ran out of hours before I ran out of facilities, which is the correct way around for a hotel like this.
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Dinner is a temptation of a different kind. Ayu, the hotel's fusion restaurant, does open-flame charcoal cooking with Western, Southeast Asian, and Chinese influences.
Its generous tomahawk steak comes in at 888 RMB including tax and service—a price so reasonable for this city that I briefly wondered whether the wellness program had addled my brain. It had not.
The steak was delicious, and did as much for my inner calm as the meditation gong did.
Back upstairs, the room continues the quiet campaign. A Himalayan salt lamp glows in the corner. There are nine types of pillow to choose from.
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Before bed a flask of tea arrives at the door, blended to balance whatever your chakra was found wanting in.
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I slept through the night without waking once—which, for anyone who lives in this city and seldom manages a full night of it, is the most honest endorsement one can give a hotel.
Breakfast next morning is as good as any five-star hotel in Shanghai: proper Asian and Western options, and enough healthy dishes that my red aura presumably blanched a shade or two toward pink.
By check-out time, the shape of it was clear. This is a sequence: an assessment, a prescription, a small trial, the gift of a night of genuine sleep, and a morning that arrives a little brighter than the one before it.
Whether chakras are real I still could not tell you. But my shoulders are still where they are supposed to be, and my Ayurvedic Pitta is no longer causing me stress—after all, it is the color the sky goes just before sunrise.
Would I go back? Without hesitation.
If you are carrying more tension than you would care to admit, and have a night (or two) to spare, this is where to put it down.
Book the sound bed. Order the tomahawk. Work out what color your aura is, and leave lighter having addressed any issues that might signify a chakra out of alignment.
Address
616 Yinggang East Road, Qingpu District, Shanghai, China
Approximately 10 minutes' walk from the National Exhibition and Convention Center station on Metro Line 2
Reservations
+86 21-3972 9999
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