Imperial Capital Secret City Walk: Wearing Out My 37-Size Heels and Stepping into Three Thousand Years of Beijing
Wednesday, November 1, 2023 Beijing, clear and fine
The thought that a single sycamore leaf can herald autumn across the world
is hidden away in Beijing’s fall.
The weather is neither too cold nor too hot,
with no wind, no rain, the sun shining warm all day.
Inside the old city walls and hutongs, ginkgo leaves glow yellow and maple leaves blaze red—utterly mesmerizing.
While the city is still drowsy-eyed,
autumn has already dyed the imperial capital, so beautiful it seems not of this world.
Late autumn dusk, heavy frost.
We followed V-ZUG
to celebrate the 65th birthday of a washing machine,
embarked on a “Beijing Secret City” citywalk,
visited Guo Pei’s Rose Studio, the queen of Chinese haute couture,
savored King’s Joy, China’s first three-Michelin-star vegetarian restaurant also awarded a Green Star,
and explored the secret of the MAHA residences at Xiaoyun Road No.8, the benchmark of Chinese luxury living.
Then we lazily spread ourselves out in V-ZUG’s
lifestyle-filled, richly charming showroom,
as though sprawled in paradise.
King’s Joy: A Bowl of Earthly Warmth, a Plate of Boundless Stars and Seas
“Jing” is ten to the 16th power, “Zhao” ten to the 12th, and “Yin” echoes the ancient pronunciation of “Ren” (仁), meaning benevolence and kindness. These three characters together signify infinite, immeasurable loving-kindness and compassion.
Beneath the golden autumn sun, we traced the “rooftop tile-smashing cafés” of Wudaokou and pushed open the door of King’s Joy.
Water mist rose, and this courtyard house redesigned by Zhang Yonghe felt like a dreamlike fairyland, flawlessly presenting the beauty of Chinese architecture in its exchange with the breath of nature. The interface between the buildings and the courtyard was completely opened, giving diners more chances to connect with nature and enjoy the courtyard. This very design reflects King’s Joy’s long-held advocacy for health, environmental protection, and life-care, and is also the ideal vessel for Zhang Yonghe’s own pursuit of the unity between humans and nature.
In the interplay of light and shadow, Gary Yin—third-generation heir and head chef of King’s Joy—was engrossed in opening a V-ZUG oven, infusing the dishes with V-ZUG’s unique temperature, lost in the world of presenting the finest cuisine to guests. To earn the world’s first three-Michelin-star vegetarian restaurant with a Green Star, family heritage and constant innovation are indispensable.
Inside King’s Joy’s transparent kitchen, we saw how V-ZUG’s culinary innovations have substantially supported the Michelin three-star restaurant, both in its environment and in R&D of dishes, enabling it to produce nearly a hundred new dishes each year: new menus with every solar term, carrying their shared devotion to “eat by the season” and pursuit of original natural flavors through every dish.
Twenty-two years ago, V-ZUG’s first household combi-steamer was born, launching a kitchen revolution. For the first time, we could precisely control the amount of steam, using 100% pure steam to best preserve ingredients’ optimal flavors, paired with V-ZUG’s original built-in environment sensor technology. Cooks no longer needed to manually set time and temperature—the machine could sense and adapt automatically. In 2021, the combi-steamer celebrated its 20th anniversary and brought a fully upgraded V-ZUG Excellence Line appliance series. The controllability of perfect cooking time allows carefully selected ingredients to reach near-perfect texture, turning every simple meal into a celebration of the good life bursting from diners’ mouths. This also enables chefs like Gary Yin to handle their craft with even greater ease in many Michelin-starred and high-end restaurants.
Choosing just a few dishes at random to photograph can make your mouth water. “The Buddha Jumps Over the Wall of vegetarian dishes”—this bowl of earthly warmth stews rare, precious mushrooms to extraordinary delicacy. The wild red mushroom soup selects wild red mushrooms from the Yunnan plateau, steamed for four to five hours with mineral water, a touch of rose salt, and ginger. The flavor is exquisitely fresh. One slow sip, and the tastes of origin, naturalness, and treasure rush forth instantly. After the soup is gone, inhaling the cup’s fragrance, you can sense the wondrous scent of nature, beyond compare. King’s Joy’s “Imperial Osmanthus Cream Cheese” originates from the famous dessert “sweet steamed cheese” in Dream of the Red Chamber. Fresh cow’s milk is baked bowl by bowl with an appropriate amount of fermented rice wine and sugar, then chilled and set, drizzled with a layer of osmanthus flower syrup. The elegant osmanthus fragrance tastes sweetly refreshing, melting the heart.
The commitment to ideals and heritage also witnessed V-ZUG’s epoch-making kitchen innovations. The pursuit of excellence, purity, and nature brought them together here, delivering uniquely delicious cuisine to diners. The ritualistic memory wall and the way they see off guests are also part of their hospitality.
It is a gentle breeze, it is morning dew;
It is evening glow, it is a heartbeat;
It is the irreplaceable longing on the tip of the tongue;
It is the collision between earthly warmth at King’s Joy and the vast starry seas of V-ZUG kitchen appliances.
Rose Studio: Craftsmanship Above All, the Beauty of Splendid Attire
Plane trees swayed and shed leaves in the refreshing autumn breeze. In front of Guo Pei’s Rose Studio courtyard, northern autumn kept pressure and ease in balance. You may not know her name, but you’ve definitely seen her work.
Heralded as “the standard-bearer of Chinese haute couture,” Guo Pei’s studio, Rose Studio, is located in a four-story, 3000-square-meter building in Beijing’s North Fifth Ring area. Since its founding, Rose Studio has influenced global fashion with its unique charm—luxurious, aesthetic, elegant, and exquisite—and has become a banner of Chinese haute couture.
Guo Pei’s haute couture gowns have appeared for over twenty consecutive years on the familiar Spring Festival Gala stage. She also designed the ceremonial gowns for the 2008 Beijing Olympics. Stars wear Guo Pei pieces on the red carpet as their “anchor.” In 2015, Rihanna wore Guo Pei’s “Yellow Empress” at the Met Gala, igniting both domestic and international fashion circles, and Guo Pei’s Chinese-style design was reposted by billions.
As the haute couture palace of China, it defines Chinese fashion, dignity, and luxury.
Rose Studio is arguably home to the most comprehensive and exquisite craftsmanship in Chinese haute couture, including embroidery, jewelry, bag-making, tassels, frog buttons, handmade flowers, and more. Its detailed composition comprises design, pattern-making, sample-making, cutting, craft, illustration, embroidery, jewelry, button, shoe-and-bag, decoration, ironing departments… At peak times, up to 200 embroiderers may work simultaneously, busy sewing several dozen gowns.
Standing before the pieces from Guo Pei’s Paris Haute Couture Week collection, “Encounter,” you can see detail flowing through the meticulously chosen materials. Guo Pei upholds the design philosophy of “Chinese learning as the foundation, Western learning for application,” fusing Chinese elements and traditional colors into Baroque and Rococo styles. What leaps into the eye is the beauty of intricate, ornate, sculpted, and overwhelmingly rich details.
On the second floor of Rose Studio, one white gown covered in beadings and sequins is especially striking: gold threads as fine as hair are twisted with specially made cotton threads into embroidery silk, then stitch by stitch hand-sewn onto the garment. Under the light, a gown made by cutting tens of thousands of sequins into unbroken shreds, then threaded and wound into shape, reveals a glamorous beauty…
In 2010, after visiting Rose Studio, Cathy Horyn, authoritative fashion critic from The New York Times, praised Guo Pei’s work as “on a par with the craftsmanship of Paris fashion, and at times even surpassing it.”
In Guo Pei’s world, each piece deserves the best care—like a lover, a partner, a close friend, a child. So, between the two distinctly styled reception rooms on Rose Studio’s second floor, the quietly standing V-ZUG RefreshButler garment care appliance gives Guo Pei confidence to explore unlimited fabric creativity. For fabrics requiring extra-special care, the RefreshButler acts more like a thoughtful companion. Gentle heat pump technology produces steam, while inside the machine a mild treatment combines with a patented photocatalyst decomposition technology. Just adding water transforms odors and stains into carbon dioxide, achieving four-in-one sterilization, wrinkle removal, deodorization, and drying, keeping fabrics in their most pristine state at all times… thus ensuring haute couture garments are preserved and maintained to retain their original quality and beauty.
What Guo Pei values is V-ZUG’s meticulous approach to fabric care, bringing care to garments from the detail of the fiber—a pure love composed of technology and tenderness.
This is Guo Pei, and this is V-ZUG.
MAHA Club & Residences Beijing:
Where Beautiful Things Meet
Xiaoyun Road No.8 signifies mystery and taste in people’s hearts.
MAHA, evolved from the Sanskrit MAHAMAN, stands for greatness, peace, and tranquil wisdom. MAHA Beijing represents the ultimate lifestyle of refined taste, offering elegance, serenity, tranquility, and vitality.
Passing through a 400,000-square-meter forest, the buildings of MAHA Club & Residences Beijing are gently placed within the century-old green sea of Chaoyang Park. At dawn and dusk, thin mist rises, the haze thickens, layer upon overlapping layer like a twilight forest, as if in a dream. Many of the beautiful sensations we strive for are realized here and made eternal—from the moment you arrive, you’re enveloped by subtle pleasure and satisfaction of the senses, a long-awaited release.
At Xiaoyun Road No.8, world-leading luxury hotel founder and father of luxury hospitality, Adrian Zecha, together with industry leader Jonathan Breene and their global team, has created the new MAHA Club & Residences Beijing in the traditional luxury mansion and embassy district. They have regenerated the gardens, architecture, and Beijing’s uniquely ancient culture, weaving every detail of the MAHA lifestyle into the design, seamlessly integrating design, service, nature, and local culture to create a rare, limitless service and residential experience, leaving guests or residents with a lasting and unrepeatable lifestyle.
MAHA Club & Residences Beijing offers just two types of residences: 450 sqm and 900 sqm walk-in aesthetic spaces with light and shadow. The interior design appears simple and natural, yet the power of space and the comfort of a lighting design with eight exclusive scenes attend to the guests’ every mood. Extensive use of natural wood has a powerful calming effect, helping one return here to soothe the mind, fully relax, and truly be oneself.
Amidst ever-changing light, shadow, and spatial transitions—like the blossoming of the unique domed chandeliers, sunlight streaming through large French windows into the sky courtyard, the sunset restaurant, and the spacious reception lounge and wine bar, the “space capsule” where twenty minutes’ lying down yields a deep rest experience… everything stimulates our yearning for beauty.
At MAHA Club & Residences Beijing, the full range of V-ZUG products—from kitchen appliances to laundry care—showcases the elegance of top-tier luxury living. The social kitchen links everything together; an afternoon tea prepared by a Cordon Bleu-level chef can steer conversations either to the ends of the universe or the heat at the Earth’s core.
With over a century of history, V-ZUG has always been devoted to the design, research, development, and manufacturing of kitchen appliances and garment care equipment, upholding Swiss precision quality, exceptional innovation, forward-looking design, user-friendly operation, and sustainable development throughout.
It is a quiet reverence for great spaces, the anticipation of something long awaited.
Without a doubt, this is the meeting of one kind of beauty with another.
V-ZUG Store at SKP:
Top-tier Living Technology within Twenty Square Meters
Beijing SKP is one of the capital’s most bustling and high-end shopping destinations. As a unique retail site, it blends luxury shopping, culture, art, and lifestyle—a diamond atop China’s commercial pyramid, drawing visitors from around the world and local residents alike.
The V-ZUG experience store is on the 5th floor of SKP. Within just twenty square meters, it cleverly displays the full range of V-ZUG products: refrigerators, wine cabinets, combi-steamers, dishwashers, laundry care series… constructing an aesthetic balance unique to V-ZUG, embodying a perfect fusion of technology, fashion, art, and luxury.
Anyone who steps inside can deeply experience the V-ZUG garment care series and the “Excellence Line” kitchen appliances. The design language of “ultimate simplicity, luxury in the details” articulates the products’ allure from every angle. It goes beyond the clean lines and contours—more importantly, it infuses the wisdom of truly living into every detail, making you love them more the more you use them, until you can’t live without them.
At the entrance stands the V-ZUG ADORA laundry care series and RefreshButler garment care appliance; directly opposite is an open kitchen: the cooktop’s clever technology automatically senses the number of pots on its surface and starts cooking mode accordingly, while the refrigerator’s freshness preservation restores ingredients to an astonishing degree.
This means you can, bathed in morning sunlight, hand-make a dessert that creates a crispy crust on ice cream in just three minutes, slowly DIY the plating of a fire-roasted ice cream, or even prepare a Spanish seafood paella while constructing inspirations for the art of living—and naturally your heart will well up with an ode to the good life.
The washing machine is hailed as one of the hundred greatest inventions in human history. Human wisdom, experience, and skill have gradually freed our hands, winning us more living space and time. For over a century, every iteration of the washing machine has mirrored synchronous transformations and evolutions in the human lifestyle. Our connection with the washing machine has evolved from a simple laborsaving device to a loving companion in our beautiful life today, and to some extent, has helped create many of our life’s highlight moments.
V-ZUG’s garment care family is composed of the ADORA washing machine, dryer, and the RefreshButler garment care appliance. Standing before these not-so-cold machines, it almost feels as if even the clothes on your body are starting to relax, the fibers of the fabric brimming with stretching, flowing vitality—representing V-ZUG’s meaning of wearing boldly and living freely.
This little over twenty square meters represents trailblazing innovation courage and strength beyond the era, the heritage of a century of Swiss precision.
And even more, it represents top-tier living technology.
V-ZUG Emperor Center:
Celebrating a Washing Machine’s 65th Birthday
V-ZUG’s experience center at Emperor Square is right next to Nicholas Tse’s “Chef Nic”—through the floor-to-ceiling windows, V-ZUG kitchen appliances are prominently present.
At the entrance to the experience center stands a 65-year-old ADORA. If no one specially introduced it, you would never guess her advanced age: spotless, neat and clean, her cold body exudes the breath of a family legacy, flowing with ancient, silent years, yet looking as if she had just completed her historical mission yesterday and awaits new responsibilities. Nearby, a centenary pure-copper centrifuge also tells the heritage depth of the V-ZUG brand.
Compared to neighboring storefronts, this space feels more like a tech-filled living space: desserts, snacks, ice cream, even afternoon tea, combine with the laundry care area housing washing machines and dryers, full of high-tech magic and rich lifestyle vibes.
Every product works in synergy, defining a unique sensation of living and indulging the beauty within; V-ZUG Living Life is not merely a lifestyle, but an attitude of pursuing excellent quality and happiness.
At 2 p.m., we moved from the showroom to the Emperor cinema hall to celebrate ADORA’s 65th birthday.
Dealers from across the country, V-ZUG fans, and numerous adherents of the V-ZUG lifestyle gathered here. Many interesting people in an interesting space were led by the humorous, hall-of-fame pianist and V-ZUG Brand Ambassador Zhao Yinyin, who shared fun stories of their connections with V-ZUG.
A tech-savvy engineer telling his story through self-filmed videos, a salesperson who treats ADORA as his fabric lover, V-ZUG enthusiasts, luxury residence owner representatives, brand partners, media representatives… each in their own way expressed their love and admiration for this century-old, excellence-seeking brand.
The most memorable was Mr. Li from Shanxi. Before becoming a V-ZUG dealer, he spent a fortune buying all high-end laundry care products on the market, took them home, tried them one by one, and after repeated comparisons finally chose to partner with V-ZUG. Now, his territory can sell an average of over ten V6000 units per month—reportedly, these discerning wealthy clients all visited his home, compared the products in use, and decisively chose V-ZUG.
It’s like the martial arts novel character “Dugu Qiubai,” and it also echoes what Ms. Jennifer Bao, Managing Director of V-ZUG Greater China, said in her speech: in solitude, constantly surpassing, self-breaking through.
No laundry care segment could be missed. Zhao Yinyin, who loves to perform “laundry magic” in front of his wife Chen Shu, brought a Moncler wool knit hooded down jacket with a complex fabric mix. After an hour and a half of attentive care from the ADORA, with its Swiss watch-grade precision—an integrated drum formed from 14,000 micro-holes with a machining accuracy of 0.008 mm, merely one-tenth the thickness of a human hair, and uniformly arranged metal holes—it emerged looking refreshingly renewed, still quickening the pulse. Please, let me win a discount voucher, can I?
Perhaps my devotion was enough; ADORA really heard my call. Tremendous luck struck me, and I won!
Starting tomorrow, I officially announce that I join the V-ZUG enthusiast family and embrace a brand-new attitude toward life.
Yes, V-ZUG is not just a lifestyle, it’s a philosophy of living.
A Century of True Love, Consistently Unchanged
Walking amidst Beijing’s urban splendors is profoundly pleasant. The neon flickers between light and dark, the endless stream of traffic converges with the street lamps that have been waiting all along, trailing light arcs like drawn wires, and it feels as if I can finally stand outside the world and gaze at this city. Everything here feels both familiar and strange; amid the old culture and bygone memories, a turn brings you face to face with fashionable prosperity. Because the inclusive culture has nurtured the most open spirit!
This is exactly the temperament of Beijing: the ancient and the innovative, the traditional and the modern, the cultural and the trendy, seamlessly combined into a whole here, and smoothly, translucently, continuously nourishing this city.
And thus V-ZUG appears particularly in its element here. Heritage, innovation, technology, and a stubborn meticulousness—this is V-ZUG’s unique aesthetics and efficiency, constructing for everyone a poetic and beautiful quality of life that merges seamlessly, like no distance at all, with the city of Beijing.
For everyone who chooses V-ZUG, this walk conveys to more people the important value of an environmentally friendly and sustainable lifestyle.
It also conveys to more people the care and love of V-ZUG.
A century of cherished love, always the same.
- END -
Text | Lian Erye
Layout | Huamei
Photos | V-ZUG, Lian Erye, Agan
