Astor House: Where We Had Dinner

Throughout the 1910s and 1920s, the Astor House was one of Shanghai's great dinner and party spots with a public buffet and bar at the south-west corner of the ground floor, a large dining hall and the "Peacock Hall" - Shanghai's largest banquet hall upstairs, plus half a dozen private dining rooms.

Many of the locals of the international community as well as the Chinese merchant and political class were regular visitors for dinners and various events. Large passenger liners often docked just to the east of the hotel along the Pujiang, and passengers would use the opportunity to have a dinner off board at the famous Astor House.

This picture is from an unsent postcard that has a handwritten note on the front: "Astor House Hotel Shanghai - where we had dinner - July 26 1923". The date gives us an upper limit for placing this postcard. It was most likely not fresh from the presses in 1923 but from a few years earlier.

The hotel took on this form with its re-opening in 1911 after some tortuous restoration and extension work, but from other photos in my collection (see more in the next installment), my guess is that this colorized photo is from the late 1910s.

In many colorized postcards from this era the hotel is shown with brilliantly red masonry with white accents on the pillars on the second and third floors. After a further renovation in 1923, photos - like our previous entry - show the hotel to be much more evenly pale, and later progressively darker with soot. I'm not clear if red paint had been removed or if naturally red stone was overpainted white in 1923.

The roads visible here are Whangpoo Road in front of the hotel and Seward Road continuing on from the Garden Bridge to our left. Tram tracks are visible on Seward Road with a branch turning left into Whangpoo Road.

The door at the corner of the hotel seems to be open, leading into the public bar and buffet. The second window to the right holds a board with announcements, probably for upcoming events at the hotel, which featured not just parties and concerts, but also movies shown in the hotel's garden. It was, in fact, the first venue to screen western movies in China.

In the next post, we will step a little further back into the past...