Karaoke, Fruit Bar, and Himalayan Salt Rooms: Inside Chongqing’s 24-Hour Spas

Amid a summer of ‘China-maxxing’, Westerners newly identifying with Chinese culture are flocking to China’s 24-hour spas. (Photo: Supplied)

Stepping into a Chinese 24-hour spa is like winning a golden ticket to Wonka's Chocolate Factory. Suddenly you are Charlie Bucket, marvelling at a world that shouldn't exist. You leave your everyday self at the door and, for one night only, join the ranks of the rich and pampered.

Mine was in Chongqing, the sprawling, multi-layered megacity that social media likes to call cyberpunk. It began in the least glamorous way possible: a nondescript industrial building, and a glass elevator that carried us underground into a windowless basement.

At the front desk you hand over about NZ$75, and the transformation begins. You shed your outside clothes, waterfall-shower away the day, and change into the uniform: disposable underwear, pastel pyjamas, a fluffy robe, and a waterproof wristband that everything inside depends on. It opens your locker. It pays for your extras. It is, for the next however-many hours, your entire identity.

You are inside, and your life is outside. And it feels good.

From indulgent pampering to an extensive gastronomic experience, China’s 24-hour luxury spas offer far more than relaxation. (Photo: Supplied)

A night of soft excess

The options for how to spend this blip in the time-space continuum are almost absurd. There are hot spring pools lit in neon, all Blade Runner blues and pinks. There is a sauna, and poolside snacks of chilled cucumber and boiled peanuts. And above the main pool hangs an enormous cinema screen. I spent the length of two Christopher Nolan films floating on an inflatable dinosaur, which is not a sentence I expected to write.

When the water starts to wrinkle you, there is food. Included in the entry price is the Fruit Bar: tiny slices of mango, passionfruit and raspberry, each on its own little plate, half-hidden in clouds of dry ice. Small sweet tarts. Ice cream. Any drink you can name. One floor up, a grand dining hall serves barbecued skewers, pork belly, beef noodles and fish, cooked however you like.

Then there's everything else: private karaoke rooms, massage parlours, hot stones, a gaming centre, a ball pit, actual beds, and a steam room lined with Himalayan salt. The walls are actually made of salt. My friend even gave them a taste test to make sure.

Time loosens in a place like this. At 3am I was having a foot massage in a private room, watching the fifth Harry Potter film on my own screen. At 4am we were eating ice cream in a teepee. At 5am our time was up, and we stepped back out into Chongqing as the sun came up. It felt like waking from a dream, a lovely one, with a faintly strange, Coraline-ish aftertaste I couldn't quite shake.

A luxury spa in China features karaoke rooms, gaming centres and Himalayan salt steam rooms. (Photo: Supplied)

From neighbourhood bathhouse to viral destination

In Chinese these places are called xǐyù zhōngxīn (洗浴中心), or bathing centres, and they grow out of a much older tradition. In the days when many homes had no bathroom, the communal bathhouse was where people went to wash, warm up, gossip and rest. It was ordinary, everyday infrastructure.

Today's versions are anything but ordinary. Some advertise lobster and caviar, free premium-brand makeup in the changing rooms, even scuba lessons, as one spa in Shenzhen offers. Entry typically runs from around 300 to 1,000 yuan (roughly NZ$75 to NZ$250), usually with food and facilities included.

They are having a moment. 2026 has been a big year for travel to China, and the 24-hour spa has become one of its signature experiences, sitting alongside cave luges, cliffside bungee jumps in Zhangjiajie and motorbike rides through Chongqing's stacked streets in a steady stream of travel videos. 'Chinese spa day in my life' clips from foreign visitors rack up views, and the trend is domestic too: lifestyle platform Meituan has reported a 166% jump in searches for bathhouses.

The spas also fit neatly into what some young people online have started calling 'China-maxxing', a semi-ironic trend of adopting habits seen as Chinese, from drinking hot water to wearing house slippers indoors. Much of it is wellness-flavoured, and much of it is affectionate. Some of it, Chinese users have gently pointed out, involves customs most people in China don't actually follow.

Luxury, at the right exchange rate

Part of the spell, I think, is that the spa offers something that feels out of reach at home. Back in New Zealand, a single massage can cost more than my whole night in Chongqing. 'Wellness', with its retreats and treatments and spa days, often feels like something you have to save up for, a small luxury to get you through the week rather than something built into ordinary life.

It's a strange way to think about feeling well. Somewhere along the line, self-care became something we but in short, consumable bursts: a spa day here, a retreat there, a little release of pressure to make the rest of the week bearable. The 24-hour spa is the purest version of that idea I've ever seen. Every kind of comfort you can think of, for exactly one day, and then back to normal life.

So it's a heady feeling to walk into a place where all of it is suddenly available, all at once, all night, for the price of a nice dinner. For a few hours you get to feel completely looked after.

But it's worth asking who it's affordable for.

My NZ$75 went a long way partly because of the exchange rate. Three hundred yuan or more is not small change for many people in China, and I suspect the locals floating beside me were not a cross-section of the city. Young people in China are under their own pressures: in July 2026, youth unemployment sat at a record 17.9 percent, and many new graduates are struggling to find work. Plenty of them could use a night of being looked after too.

In the first half of 2026 alone, China received approximately 22.914 million foreign tourists — a 20.4% increase from 2025 numbers. (Photo: Supplied)

Looking back, the details I remember most aren't the fruit or the films. They're the small things that didn't quite fit.

The building felt eerily new. Behind half-open doors you could glimpse unfinished walls and bare concrete. Staff were everywhere, always attentive, always offering a hot towel, always asking where you were headed next, and gently steering you away from the corridors you weren't meant to wander down. When I lost my wristband for ten minutes, I panicked as if I'd committed a crime.

It's a paradise built on frictionlessness and constant attention, and those two things can feel very close to being watched. I started to understand why the experience is capped at a day. Any longer, and the set pieces might start to show their seams. Any longer, and paradise might begin to feel like a very comfortable place you aren't allowed to leave.

What I took home

None of this makes the night less magical. I'd go back tomorrow. But the spa taught me something about how we look at places like this, especially through a phone screen. The videos show the dry ice and the dinosaur floaties. They don't show the unfinished walls, or the people who can't afford to get in.

It is not a new habit. As writer Millie Hughes has explored, European elites once filled 'Chinese Rooms' with objects most Chinese households would never have recognised, a version of China arranged for Western eyes. A carefully curated travel feed can do something similar.

Both are real. The spa is genuinely wonderful, and genuinely a fantasy, a dream you can crawl into for 1,440 minutes before the sun comes up and you have to go home. I think the best way to visit, and maybe the best way to see anywhere new, is to let yourself marvel and keep your eyes open at the same time.

-Asia Media Centre