How Hong Kong’s Peninsula hotel came to be – in the 1920s, accommodation could not be found for ‘love nor money’
- The need for rooms at the beginning of the decade was so great a visiting opera company could not find a hotel to accommodate them all
- In 1921, plans for a property where each room would have its own bathroom with ‘modern plumbing’ were drawn up
At the beginning of 1920 – with the worst of the Spanish flu pandemic over and relieved tourists flocking abroad in full carpe diem mode – Hong Kong’s hotels were full. The Hongkong Hotel, the King Edward Hotel, the Palace and the Carlton were all still advertising in the papers, but vacancies were rare.
“The need for hotel accommodation in Hongkong,” declared The Hongkong Daily Press on January 9, “has never been so felt as in the last two days.” The 83-strong Russian Grand Opera Company, it was noted, had recently arrived by Japanese steamer and its manager “had to hunt for accommodation all over the city and, finally, had to distribute them among nearly all the hotels, including the Japanese and the Chinese hotels.”
A few weeks later, The Hongkong Telegraph reported that “Hotel accommodation cannot be had to-day even for love or money. The Hotels are absolutely packed, and many tourists have had to go to Canton or Macao.” In April, the same paper published a front-page article bemoaning the “vast number of American tourists now coming to the Far East” and the consequent room shortage: “Hongkong, as the terminus of the great passenger lines from America, has suffered in particular from the want of adequate hotel accommodation.”
At least one major shipping company, Canadian Pacific, suggested that they themselves might build a grand luxury hotel if no one else did. So, the following March, Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels revealed at its annual meeting that a new property might be built on the unfashionable southern tip of Kowloon. By August, plans were being prepared for the hotel, in which “each room will have a self-contained bathroom, with modern plumbing installed”, and with “its own self-contained hospital and operating theatre, and many other features entirely new to the Far East”.
Those original plans were scrapped but in April 1923, it was announced that the hotel would open the next year. Further delays ensued, but the property did eventually open, on December 11, 1928, as The Peninsula hotel.
Roadside Americans: a history of hitch-hiking in the US
Back in the 1970s, Ken Walsh began his long-running but now out-of-print budget-traveller’s bible The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe with the following advice: “Hitch-hiking is a game of chance. In this world where we expect things to run on time or to be in a certain place by three o’clock, it is a refreshing experience. Just because the ninth car doesn’t stop doesn’t mean the tenth will; nor the hundredth, nor the thousandth. But you’ll get there.”
The patience and optimism required of the hitch-hiker might be useful qualities for anyone yearning for the open road in these difficult times, and a new book looking at the history of hitch-hiking in the United States, Roadside Americans, by Jack Reid, looks like an interesting read.
The book is for sale in a Kindle edition at Amazon.com, where a preview of the introduction and first chapter is also available. While there, you can also find old copies of The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to Europe, which is said to have given backpacker-cum-author Douglas Adams the title for The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy.
Explore the world from the comfort of your own home
A home exercise bike, treadmill or stepper set up in front of a television, or a large-screen desktop computer, can keep you in shape while virtually travelling the globe for free. YouTube channels such as Prowalk Tours will give you a high-definition walker’s-eye view of scenic Italian destinations such as Procida, Sorrento and Venice, or you can get in the driver’s seat and motor around Paris, London, Tokyo, Singapore and elsewhere with the J Utah channel.
More sedate are Watched Walker’s wanderings around London, Cannes and Nice, while Bike the World offers more strenuous cyclist’s-view trips through French mountain roads to Provence and beyond. These channels, and many others like them, can of course be viewed while using any kind of exercise machine, and are also a pleasant way to revisit past holiday destinations, as a family or alone, from the comfort of your sofa.
