Iconic hotel’s longest serving employee still on the job

He’s the longest serving employee at the Peninsula Hotel, having worked at the former railway hotel for a mere 56 years. Johnny Chung Kam-hung began as a trainee bus boy at 14 and now at 70 he has no imminent plans for retirement. The Peninsula, itself only 15 years older than Chung, marks its 85th anniversary this year. For Chung, the hotel has not only been his workplace, but his life-long family.

“My Dad was the lobby captain at the Peninsula,” says Chung, seated in The Bar, where he works as senior bartender on the hotel’s first floor. “He worked here for eight years. When he passed away from lung cancer because the hotel is very family orientated they offered me a position as a bus boy trainee. I was 14. My mother was very proud that I had a job in a hotel, as they were not easy to come by. My brother worked at the Miramar Hotel.

“I started working here in 1957 and I remember walking into the lobby on my first day and I was so nervous.”

Chung began his long career at the Peninsula as a messenger boy, delivering messages, letters and magazines to different departments within the hotel premises. “After three months, I was transferred to the lobby bar as a bus boy. Every morning, I would clean the bar tables. Most of my job was cleaning at the time. I would wear a white Chinese style top and black trousers.”

Chung also remembers trying to improve his English in those early years, studying in 1962 for three months at the Yaumatei YMCA, but a fellow worker at the Peninsula told him to read the South China Morning Post  - the small news items - and that’s how he says he enlarged his vocabulary.