My night in the world’s first underground hotel

There’s an unspoken rule when it comes to hotel pricing: the higher the floor, the more you pay. Not at the InterContinental Shanghai Wonderland. Here, guests pay a premium to be on the lowest floors. But then this is no ordinary hotel.

Set against the side of an abandoned quarry about 30 miles west of the city centre, the Wonderland became the world’s first subterranean hotel when it opened in November 2018. And now it’s back in the limelight with a starring role on the new season of Amazing Hotels: Life Beyond the Lobby with Monica Galetti and Rob Rinder.

Part of the hype around this property comes from the concept: the hotel is essentially an upside-down skyscraper where the floor number goes up as you go deeper underground. The so-called earthscraper has just two floors above ground; the remaining 16 storeys extend down to a depth of 88m, with every room featuring a quarry view. As an engineering first, it was so technically challenging to build that construction took 12 years.

Adding to the appeal is the way the building echoes its surroundings. There’s the obvious way the polished glass and dull aluminium exterior reflect the grey of the rocks, but there’s also the way the curve of the building mimics the shape of the quarry — it’s concave on one side and convex on the other, with a glass lift shaft between them that resembles a cascading waterfall. From afar, it’s a stunning architectural showpiece that seamlessly blends into its environment, despite appearing so futuristic that your mind tells you it couldn’t possibly be real.

Not that I saw much of it when I checked in at 11pm, beyond the centre of the earth-themed lobby where giant boulders resembling mineral deposits and displays of black bears dressed in mining gear were dotted around the cavernous hall. I was disappointed to learn I had missed the nightly light show, designed to transform the rock face into a stage and the balcony of every single room into a private box. I’m told it’s quite a spectacular display, with animated light projection accompanied by music and drones. It’s a big part of the hotel experience, although for some reason it’s not advertised on their website. Fortunately there was also a fountain show, where falling water is used to create different images to music, that I could catch the following day.

My disappointment disappeared when I got to my room, a Premium King on the sixth floor, about a third of the way down the earthscraper. Spacious, with a steampunk vibe, teal-coloured fabrics covered the walls, accented with a burnished bronze panel. The upholstered seating areas were decorated with faux buckles and pale oak furniture throughout made the room seem brighter than it otherwise would have been. There’s also an in-room tablet powered by a voice-activated AI bot from Baidu, the Chinese equivalent of Google, that you can use to do things such as opening the blinds — if you know how to speak Mandarin, that is. Meanwhile, sliding doors opened into the equally large bathroom, featuring a monsoon shower and a soaking tub, plus one of those fancy Japanese toilets with heated seats.

There are over 330 rooms at the property and most are like mine. But for those with more cash to splash, some of the most expensive suites are a clutch of duplexes down on the 15th floor. These have aquariums in the living rooms that take up an entire wall, giving the impression that you’re underwater. There are also a handful of waterfall-view suites, with bathtubs so big you could swim in them.

Jet lag had me up by 6am, when I got a glimpse of the quarry from my balcony for the first time. The jagged rock face in front of me had already been partially colonised by foliage, with a man-made waterfall on one side. Trees lined the top, hiding a toddler-friendly theme park beyond. Below, the base of the quarry had been flooded, creating a forest-green lake where the occasional flicker of iridescent orange betrayed the location of the koi carp surfacing for air. And in the middle of all this green was a rocky island, topped with a single bonsai pine. I hadn’t expected the view to be quite so pretty, and the echoey coo of pigeons made it lovelier still.

The calm start to my morning was disrupted by the cacophony at Commune, the buffet restaurant on the ground floor serving everything from sausages and beans to wontons cooked to order. There were two other restaurants that I didn’t get a chance to visit. Cai Feng Lou is the signature Chinese restaurant, where dishes such as braised belly pork with rice cake (£31) and fried spicy crab with 18 spices (£26), are served banquet-style on the upper ground floor during lunch and dinner, alongside a view across the top of the quarry. Then down on the 15th floor is Mr Fisher, open in the evenings only, where guests enjoy seafood-centric tasting menus (£157pp), featuring dishes such as oyster on kiwi melon smoothie and confit king salmon, while seated next to giant aquariums stocked with stingrays, nurse sharks and groupers.

While I was there, almost all of the guests were Chinese, and many spoke only Cantonese, a dialect used mainly by those from the southern province of Guangzhou and Hong Kong. I wondered if they had specifically chosen to come here for luck, because the hotel leaned heavily into the number eight, a lucky number in China. The number was everywhere — the address of the hotel, its phone number, the apparent depth of the quarry and even the timing of breakfast each day, which started at the weirdly specific time of 6.28am. Fingers crossed that some of the luck rubbed off on me. Even if not, I certainly felt fortunate to have stayed somewhere so unique.

Qin Xie