China's Bathhouse Boom Is the Public Face of a 120-Billion-Yuan TCM Wellness Industry — What International Patients Should Know

BEIJING / SINGAPORE — A 120-billion-yuan-a-year industry with year-on-year growth above 20% for four consecutive years is a public health story whether the people inside are paying attention to it or not. The Straits Times published that figure, drawn from the 2025 China Leisure Bathhouse Industry Development White Paper, on 3 July 2026, alongside a long-form report from Beijing correspondent Michelle Ng about what is now happening inside the venues — university students celebrating exam season overnight on beanbags, three-generation families occupying entire floors at a time, mahjong and karaoke and afternoon naps blending into the steam and the scrub and the buffet. A $45 million Chinese-style bathhouse opened earlier in 2026 in Singapore's Jurong East. A 300m street in Beijing can hold four venues targeting three different consumer segments side-by-side, with a 16-hour weekday pass at Shui Guo for around 300 yuan (about S$57), and a cuozao, the body-scrub that is one of the most photogenic parts of the tradition, costing an additional 200 yuan for a 40-minute session.

For an international patient who is reading the bathhouse article and trying to figure out what, if anything, it has to do with the China Hospitals Guide universe, the short answer is that the bathhouse is the publicly visible face of a tradition that, in its more medicalised form, runs through the hospital wellness departments, the TCM oncology support programs, the Bo'ao Lecheng TCM service menu, and the Hainan hot-spring convalescence programs that some patients book after a course of chemotherapy, joint replacement, or stroke rehabilitation. The 120 billion yuan figure is a leisure-economy figure. The integrated clinical wellness ecosystem that the same tradition supports is smaller, less visible, and more medically rigorous, and the international patient who can recognise the connection between the two is the one who can move through the offer.

What the Straits Times bathhouse story documents

The Straits Times article, written by Beijing correspondent Michelle Ng from a day she spent at Shui Guo in June, is a scene-driven travel-and-business piece, not a health-policy report. The reporting covers what a bathhouse day now looks like (steam pools and body scrubs and mahjong in the same facility, with families occupying upper floors and office workers charging laptops between sauna visits), the tiered price structure (the 300 yuan Shui Guo weekday pass versus the 1,200 yuan Qushui Lanting business-class admission with caviar and lobster in the buffet), the expansion trajectory (Shui Guo from one Beijing venue to nine branches in six cities, the 2025 White Paper market sizing of 120 billion yuan at 10.5% year-on-year growth), and the historical framing (Qin Dynasty ritual bathing, Song Dynasty commercial bathhouses, Republican-era hygiene-culture popularisation, post-1949 state-enterprise welfare provisioning, 1990s restructuring, and the current commercial reinvention). Two of the article's three named sources are useful for international patients trying to understand where the clinical tradition intersects the leisure boom.

Kan Li, an assistant professor of modern China history at Xi'an Jiaotong-Liverpool University, traces the modern commercial bathhouse form to northeast China (Liaoning, Jilin, Heilongjiang), which was China's industrial base in the early decades of the People's Republic. Large state-owned enterprises provided workers with spacious communal bathhouses as part of their welfare benefits. When many of those facilities disappeared during state-sector restructuring in the 1990s, the cultural habit of communal bathing endured into private commercial form, Li argues, and the legacy shows up today in the cuozao-as-labor-skill (No. 517, a Gansu-born attendant at Shui Guo, told the Straits Times that body-scrubbing "is a skill that can get me hired in almost every bathhouse in China") and in the willingness of young Chinese consumers to treat a 16-hour bathhouse ticket as a more affordable alternative to a hotel stay or a weekend getaway.

Liu Simin, a researcher at the China Culture and Tourism Research Centre of Beijing International Studies University, frames the boom as part of China's broader shift toward experience-led consumption, with the bathhouse industry as one of the few service sectors to have sustained continuous growth in recent years. The McDonald's analogy (standardised offer, chain-economical replication, demographic-segment differentiation by location and price point) is one way to read the industry's expansion. The other way — relevant for this audience — is that the bathing, body-scrubbing, herbal steam, and rest-ritual that Liu is describing in commercial terms are the same practices that, in a hospital wellness department, sit on the same evidence base and use the same accredited practitioner credential.

What changes when the same tradition operates inside a hospital

The clinical version of the bathhouse tradition lives in the 治未病 ("treating the undiseased") departments of TCM-affiliated tertiary hospitals, which combine Western internal medicine with TCM modalities — herbal medicine prescriptions, acupuncture, tuina (Chinese therapeutic massage), cupping, moxibustion, and herbal-steam inhalation — under a single coordinated care plan. Major operational departments include the Preventive Treatment Center at Beijing University of Chinese Medicine Dongzhimen Hospital (founded 1958, the flagship TCM hospital of the BUCM system), the Health Management Center at Shanghai University of TCM Yueyang Hospital of Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine (a designated TCM-Western integration pilot hospital), the Chronic Disease Management Department at Guangdong Provincial Hospital of Chinese Medicine (one of the highest-volume TCM oncology programs in the country), and comparable departments at Nanjing University of Chinese Medicine, Chengdu University of TCM, and Tianjin University of TCM. These departments see three categories of international patients: pre-operative conditioning for joint replacement or cardiac surgery, post-chemo conditioning and immune support during oncology aftercare, and chronic-pain management in conditions where Western first-line therapy has produced incomplete relief.

The relevant detail for an international patient who sees a 16-hour leisure bathhouse pass on social media and wonders whether the underlying practice is "real medicine" is that the credential and training pathway are completely different in the two settings. In a commercial bathhouse, the cuozao practitioner is typically a vocational-trained technician who has completed a regional bathhouse-industry certification (the kind that No. 517, the 40-something Gansu-born attendant at Shui Guo, holds); the offered services are regulated under local commercial-service rules rather than healthcare regulations. In a hospital wellness department, the practitioner who delivers tuina or cupping is a licensed TCM physician or licensed TCM therapist who has completed a 5-year bachelor of traditional Chinese medicine program (the standard credential in China), followed by 1 to 3 years of clinical specialty training, and the offered services are billed under the hospital's outpatient schedule and are eligible for reimbursement under most Chinese commercial health insurance plans. The two credential paths do not overlap, and the hospital setting carries the additional layer of an attending Western-trained internist who supervises the integrated care plan and coordinates with the patient's home physician.

The 2025 Bo'ao Lecheng white paper on inbound medical tourism for TCM services, referenced in the 2026-04-21 article on Hainan medical tourism in this archive, found that international patients coming to mainland China for TCM wellness services cluster into four indications: chronic pain (low back pain, cervical spondylosis, post-herpetic neuralgia), insomnia and stress-related disorders, oncology support during and after chemo or radiation, and post-acute recovery after orthopedic or cardiovascular surgery. The 2025 case-mix for international patients at TCM wellness departments in tier-1 hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou was approximately 40% chronic pain, 25% oncology support, 20% post-acute recovery, and 15% insomnia and stress-related disorders. The international patient who can recognise that the hospital 治未病 department and the commercial bathhouse are operating from the same cultural playbook but with two different credential pathways, two different regulatory environments, and two different cost structures is the one who can read the offer without confusion.

What Hainan hot-spring convalescence looks like for an international patient

For an international patient considering Hainan as a TCM wellness destination, the offering sits inside the Bo'ao Lecheng international medical tourism zone and the surrounding Sanya and Haikou hot-spring corridor, with three operational layers. The first layer is the hospital-based 治未病 program at the Bo'ao Super Hospital (the Hainan branch of several tier-1 mainland TCM hospitals, including Yueyang and Dongzhimen under the Bo'ao licensing framework), where international patients are seen by a coordinated TCM-Western team for chronic-pain management, oncology support, or post-acute recovery, with an outpatient schedule that integrates tuina, acupuncture, herbal medicine prescriptions, and Western internal medicine. The second layer is the Hainan hot-spring convalescence resort program (7 to 14 day stays at venues such as the Shimei Bay hot spring resort in Lingshui or the Xinglong hot spring resort in Wanning), where an internationally trained TCM physician supervises a daily schedule of hot-spring immersion, herbal steam, tuina, and dietary therapy, and where the resort's medical clinic handles the daily check-ins and the wellness coordinator arranges the airport transfer, the accommodation, the dietary requirements, and the bilingual discharge summary.

The third layer is the Bo'ao Lecheng cross-border TCM service line, which was expanded under the Hainan free trade port policy in 2025 to include TCM pharmaceuticals and dietary-supplement products that have been authorised for international clinical use outside mainland China but not yet approved by the NMPA for general Chinese-market distribution. The international patient who is interested in TCM-derived pharmaceuticals that are not yet available in their home country can apply to access them through the Bo'ao licensed-pharmacy framework, with a prescription from a Bo'ao-affiliated TCM physician and a 3- to 6-month monitoring follow-up. The combination of a 14-day convalescence stay with a 3-month cross-border TCM prescription is the package that has most driven the 109% growth in inbound Hainan medical tourism documented in the 2026-04-21 piece in this archive.

No. 517's quote, included above in the Straits Times article, captures the labor-market side of the bathhouse story: the body-scrub has gone from a regional northeast-China tradition to a nationally portable vocational skill, the same way that a Western Swedish-massage certification is portable across US states for a massage therapist. The internationally portable equivalent at the hospital-wellness layer is the TCM physician credential (5-year BUCM or SHUTCM bachelor plus 1-3 years of specialty training plus a national medical-practitioner license examination), which is recognised in mainland China at all 治未病 departments and which qualifies the holder to deliver cuozao-adjacent therapies (tuina, cupping, moxibustion, herbal steam) under hospital supervision. An international patient can verify the credential of a specific TCM physician through the hospital's international patient services office before booking.

What an international patient should ask before booking a TCM wellness program

For an international patient who is weighing a TCM wellness program in mainland China or Hainan, the practical questions to ask the international patient services office before booking are largely the same as for any medical-tourism service, with a few specifics that the bathhouse-versus-hospital distinction surfaces. The first is the regulatory setting — is the program a hospital-based 治未病 department under a TCM-affiliated tertiary hospital, a Hainan hot-spring resort convalescence package, or a commercial bathhouse and spa — because the credential of the practitioner, the billing pathway, and the regulatory environment differ across the three. The second is the practitioner credential — a licensed TCM physician (执业医师) who has completed a 5-year BUCM, SHUTCM, or peer university bachelor plus 1-3 years of specialty training, with a verifiable registration number from the National Health Commission practitioner registry, is the appropriate credential for a clinical service; a vocational-trained cuozao technician is the appropriate credential for a leisure body-scrub, not for a clinical tuina session.

The third is the integration with the home clinic. Hospital-based 治未病 programs are designed to coordinate with the patient's home physician, and the program typically includes a bilingual discharge summary and a written transfer-of-care plan for the home physician to continue the herbal-medicine prescription and the lifestyle recommendations after the patient returns home. Hainan convalescence resort programs should be coordinated with the home clinic's specialist for the underlying condition — oncologist for oncology support, orthopedist for post-arthroplasty recovery, neurologist for post-stroke recovery. The fourth is the cost — outpatient 治未病 consultations at tier-1 TCM hospitals in Beijing, Shanghai, or Guangzhou run RMB 200 to RMB 800 per visit (US$28 to US$112), with a tuina or acupuncture session in the US$15 to US$80 range, consistent with the per-session price ranges documented in the 2026 acupuncture treatment cost guide in the related-reading section below; a 7-day Hainan hot-spring convalescence package (with the daily TCM physician check-in, two daily tuina or cupping sessions, dietary therapy, and the hot-spring access pass) runs RMB 8,000 to RMB 25,000 (US$1,120 to US$3,500), inclusive of the accommodation; a commercial Beijing bathhouse pass at the 300 yuan point is more than an order of magnitude cheaper, and the comparison is not between these prices but between the credential, the regulatory setting, and what the patient is trying to accomplish.

What the next 12 to 18 months are likely to bring

Three things are likely in the next 12 to 18 months. First, the Straits Times profile of the industry is unlikely to be the last international-press piece on the bathhouse tradition. As China continues to grow its service-export mix and as the TCM wellness industry is increasingly positioned as a soft-power offering alongside outbound clinical services, more English-language outlets will cover the sector, and the international press's coverage will increasingly bridge the leisure-bathhouse story (Shui Guo, House+ Bubble, the 120 billion yuan industry) and the clinical-wellness story (治未病, Bo'ao Lecheng, Hainan convalescence). Second, Singapore's House+ Bubble model is likely to be replicated in additional Southeast Asian markets, with Malaysian, Thai, and Vietnamese operators expected to launch Chinese-style bathhouse and spa complexes in their own countries over the next 12 to 18 months, drawing on the same Chinese operational playbook and the same cuozao-trained labor force. Third, the Bo'ao Lecheng cross-border TCM service line is likely to expand, with additional TCM-derived pharmaceuticals and dietary-supplement products added to the authorised list under the Hainan free trade port framework, and the 治未病 outpatient program at the Bo'ao Super Hospital is likely to add at least one new indication cluster (chronic pain is the leading candidate, given its 40% share of the international TCM case-mix in 2025).

For an international patient who is reading the Straits Times bathhouse piece and trying to figure out what it has to do with their own medical situation, the take-home is straightforward. The 120-billion-yuan industry and the 4-millisecond Singapore expansion are the leisure story. The clinical story is a separate, smaller, and more carefully credentialed ecosystem that runs through hospital 治未病 departments, Hainan hot-spring resort programs, and the Bo'ao Lecheng cross-border TCM framework. The two are connected by the same cultural tradition (the bathhouse, the body scrub, the herbal steam, the rest ritual) and disconnected by the credential, the regulatory setting, and the cost. International patients who want to access the clinical version can do so through the well-established international patient services offices of the tier-1 TCM-affiliated hospitals documented in the related-reading section, and patients who want to combine a clinical visit with a convalescence stay have the additional option of the Hainan Bo'ao Lecheng and Sanya hot-spring programs.