InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland

The quarry hotel the internet made famous — sixteen floors cascading down a cliff face, twenty minutes from China’s No.1 course.

Built inside a worked-out quarry outside Songjiang, the Wonderland is the hotel people photograph before they photograph their golf. Two floors sit below the waterline of the quarry lake; the rooms stare up at the cliff or down into the water. It is the most memorable hotel staging point for a Shanghai golf week, and Sheshan International — the WGC-HSBC Champions course — is a twenty-minute drive.

Use it as the west-Shanghai base: Sheshan and Qizhong Gardens to the south, Anting and Meilan Lake as the variety rounds, and the whole city for the non-golf days. Shanghai Links and the Chongming courses sit further out; we sequence them on the way to the airport.

Rooms book out well before Chinese holidays; the golf calendar matters more than the hotel calendar here, so we lock tee times first and the cliff rooms second.