Budget travelers will be thrilled to stay here when visiting Xiamen!

Gulangyu's best value hotel: Huang Family Garden This is probably my third time visiting Gulangyu. But the last time was 15 years ago, when I was young, poor, and in a hurry to get on and off the island. I didn't dare to dream of staying on the island for a night. Times have changed, and although the Lin Family Mansion of the Banqiao Lin Family is still too expensive for me, the Huang Family Garden, also known as the "No. 1 Villa in China," is only over 700 yuan a night. This value for money must be recommended to everyone. Huang Family Garden was the residence of Huang Yizhu, the richest Chinese man at the time. In 1919, Huang Yizhu returned to Gulangyu from Indonesia with all his savings of more than 2.88 million US dollars (equivalent to more than 40 million silver dollars) to invest in the construction of his motherland. He built the Huang Family Garden with the intention of competing with all the Western-style buildings on the island, and thus built this huge estate with a total of six buildings covering an area of more than 10,000 square meters. The mansion is located next to the foreigner's court, a building that combines classical and Baroque styles. After the founding of the People's Republic of China, it was nationalized and hosted dignitaries such as Nixon and Lee Kuan Yew. After the reform and opening up, the property rights were returned to the descendants of the Huang family. The hotel has been renovated in recent years (I saw online that it was only reopened last year), and the facilities inside the hotel are ridiculously new, but at the same time, it retains many of the OG features, such as the need to use a key to open the door, which is quite ceremonial. I stayed in Building 1 of the South Building, a two-story building with a huge public open rest area in the atrium, with large sofas and carpets, just right for working and writing late at night, full of class.