Asia's Legendary Hotels. William Warren
somewhat unusual in that she set out alone on a grand tour of Southeast Asia in 1902, but her reactions to where she stayed were typical of other travelers. Disembarking at the wharf in Rangoon, she duly noted in her diary:“I climb into the cab of an elderly Hindoo [sic] gentleman who spirits me away from the dock… Our destination is the new Strand Hotel, opened only last year by the estimable Sarkies Brothers… From the chalk white façade to the ‘chess-board’ tiles that embellish the lobby, everything about the Strand evokes the sort of luxury that has been sorely missed on my long journey from England.” The Raffles Hotel offered a similar refuge in Singapore (“I occupy the mornings touring this ever-alluring metropolis, the afternoons writing in the shade of the Palm Court before retiring to the Tiffin Room around tea time to plot my next step in this long trek”), as did the Oriental in Bangkok (“My room is supremely comfortable, with huge shutters opening out on to a tropical garden”) and the Metropole in Hanoi (“suitably grand for a city newly honored as Indochina’s capital”).
The Raffles Hotel began life as a simple 10-room bungalow before two new wings were constructed in 1890, marking it out as one of the leading hotels in the region.
The Ananda Spa is spread over 21,000 square feet (1,950 square meters) and offers dozens of treatments incorporating Ayurvedic and Western techniques. The heated outdoor lap pool offers breathtaking views of the Himalayas.
It might be noted that Miss Beaumont actually met her future husband during one of those plotting sessions at Raffles’ Tiffin Room and became engaged to him while exploring Angkor in Cambodia three months later. Excerpts from her diaries were published in 2000, together with an account of a parallel journey made by her great nephew, who stayed in many of the same hotels.
The Taj Lake Palace in Udaipur was conceived as a private retreat and is accessible only by boat. It is perhaps best remembered as one of the magnificent locations used in the James Bond film Octopussy.
Despite their physical similarities, each great hotel had a distinctive ambiance all its own or acquired one over the years. Taking tea in the grand, gilded lobby of Hong Kong’s Peninsula, for example, you had a panoramic view of Chinese junks plying the busy harbor and white buildings climbing dramatically up the Peak on the other side. The Raffles had the private Palm Court that so appealed to Miss Beaumont on hot afternoons, a billiard table under which a tiger was supposedly discovered and a Long Bar where the potent Singapore Sling was first concocted. The splendid Taj Mahal in Bombay overlooked the Gateway of India, the first thing countless arriving Englishmen and their memsahibs saw of the subcontinent and offered special rooms for the personal servants who often accompanied guests. From the art deco lobby of the Cathay, where sleek Chinese ladies showed off their shimmering silk gowns, one could ascend by lift to a roof garden overlooking the Bund, that highly visible concentration of Shanghai’s power and wealth.
All kinds of travelers turned up in such settings—royalty, both genuine and bogus; dignitaries representing some government or other and suave conmen looking for a score; globe-trotting stars or stage and screen and world-weary socialites; writers in search of fresh material to fire their imagination and usually finding it; even a few of what would soon be known as ordinary tourists, though well-heeled ones on the whole.
Some left lasting impressions: Somerset Maugham, for instance, seems to have stayed at just about every historic hotel in Asia and a remarkable number have commemorated that fact by naming a suite after him. Noel Coward was almost as ubiquitous, adding to his (and the hotel’s) renown by writing Private Lives in just four days while confined by the flu to a suite at the Cathay. For five years, until the Japanese rudely interrupted his comfortable life, General Douglas MacArthur made his home in a penthouse atop the Manila Hotel, where it is still proudly preserved.
The four Sarkies brothers, Armenians who founded several of Asia’s most famous hotels in the late 19th century, among them the Eastern & Oriental in Penang, Raffles in Singapore, and the Strand in Yangon (Rangoon).
World War II marked the end of this era of leisurely travel, abetted by a dozen other more local conflicts that followed in its wake. One by one, willingly or otherwise, the colonials departed, carrying their memories and souvenirs off to homelands some of them only dimly remembered; new rulers took their place, with a different set of aspirations; new city centers rose, often out of near-total ruins and often, too, far from the old ones; air travel became the preferred mode of transport, though curiously, despite the greater speed that resulted, there appeared to be less time to experience places than there had been before.
The old hotels faced a growing dilemma. They had been built for a breed of traveler who seemed suddenly to have vanished, not for group tours who barely slept in their rooms or businessmen who wanted instant communication with foreign countries and all sorts of other novelties. Economic considerations were even more serious. Many of the rambling structures were in deplorable condition, suffering either from effects of war or too many years of neglect and frequently changing management. Roofs leaked, floorboards creaked, rising damp discolored the walls. Money was needed to bring them back to their former splendor, and a lot of it. Still more was needed for the large staffs still required to tend those generously proportioned suites and public rooms, not to mention for the modern bathroom fixtures and air-conditioning systems everybody now demanded. How else were they to compete with the glass-walled new hotels that were going up, no matter how deficient these rivals might be in atmosphere, service, and above all, history?
The lobby of Raffles hotel, each floor containing lounges for guests. The venerable hotel was extensively renovated at the end of the 1980s and is now preserved as a national heritage structure.
Painting of the original Oriental Hotel when it opened on Bangkok’s Chao Phraya River in 1884. Designed by a local firm of Italian architects, it was the Thai capital’s first grand hotel and, for many years, the only one.
For some, the challenges were simply too overwhelming and they gave up the fight, either closing altogether or replacing the old building with a new one on the same site, as happened with Tokyo’s Imperial. Several continued to exist physically, but in such a state of disrepair and squalor that not even the most determined seeker of nostalgia would want to spend much time in them.
Others though, resisted extinction and gradually (very gradually in a few cases) realized that being historic might not necessarily be such a bad thing after all. Not all the new breed of travelers, it turned out, were so enchanted with contemporary accommodations. Indeed, quite a few of them were looking for just the sort of atmosphere the old hotels offered in abundance, even if it happened to be in a now unfashionable or inconvenient part of the city. Sometimes it turned out that a beguiling sense of history could be provided in buildings that were not hotels at all originally but still had architectural distinction. Thus Singapore’s old post office became the elegant Fullerton, the former High Commissioner’s stately residence in Kuala Lumpur became an all-suites retreat called the Carcosa and more than a few fairy-tale Indian palaces underwent extensive renovations and opened their doors to paying guests. Another successful strategy, pursued by many, was to add an ultra-modern wing while preserving all or most of the older sections and thus satisfying several tastes.
This wave of restorations and conversions began in the early 1980s, gained momentum in the 1990s and today extends through much of Asia, from India to China. The result, as seen on the following pages, is a collection of unique establishments where the past is not only present, but celebrated—and where one can discover what it was like to travel when a hotel was more than merely a collection of rooms and a restaurant or two.