For decades, the hardy travellers that braved the icy roads and 1,200 mile drive to Lhasa from Sichuan have been greeted with austere monasteries filled with crimson-robed monks and the terrible taste of butter tea.
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| St Regis Lhasa Resort is the first international luxury hotel in Tibet Photo: RALF TOOTEN - TOOTEN PHOTOGRAPHY |
But the Chinese government, which defends its mandate to rule over Tibet by claiming to have brought economic prosperity to the region, is determined to make life more luxurious for today's pampered tourists by opening Tibet's first five-star hotel – The St Regis Lhasa.
Guests arriving at Lhasa airport are now whisked away in a Mercedes-Benz limousine to one of the hotel's 150 suites or 12 private villas.
Personal butlers escort guests to their rooms and give tips on surviving Lhasa's 12,000ft altitude. Guests are told not to shower on their first day, since hot water is believed by the Chinese to open up blood vessels and suck oxygen away from the brain. Each room, meanwhile, is equipped with tanks of oxygen, just in case.
Downstairs at the hotel, owned by the same group as the Lanesborough in London, there is a spa, a swimming pool, a restaurant boasting Cantonese and Sichuan delicacies, including yak meat, and a wine bar with hundreds of bottles specially flown in, including Chateau Lafite-Rothschild.
Any guests wanting to taste "more basic Tibetan fare, such as yak butter and boiled noodles" will have to leave the premises, the hotel's website flatly states. "They can be found nearby at the Tromzikhang market".
Tourism is now responsible for almost 15 per cent of Tibet's economy, and 6.82 million tourists visited last year, a near 22 per cent rise.
Four more five-star hotels, including a Shangri-La and an Intercontinental, are scheduled to open in the next four years, according to the local government. In addition, Beijing is planning to finally introduce a luxury train service to Tibet this summer with tickets costing as much as £6,000 a head. Even the former home of Ling Rinpoche, a tutor to the 13th Dalai Lama in the 19th century, has been turned into a boutique hotel.
"This hotel has filled a gap in the market for high-end travellers and ends Tibet's history of having no luxury hotels," said Wang Songping, the deputy head of the Tibetan Tourist Bureau.
He Shuying, a spokesman for the St Regis Lhasa, said guests had appreciated the warmth of a Tibetan welcome, and that she expected to be fully booked over the summer tourist season, but that there had been some hiccups during the hotel's trial period.
"We are flying in all of our food and daily supplies, because you cannot get them here in Lhasa," she said. "But we did once run out of lobster and Australian beef, and we got an earful from our guests.
"Also we sometimes have power cuts up here on the Tibetan plateau. There's nothing we can do about that – the whole city goes dark."
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