Behind Asia’s heritage hotels, there is a Sarkies

The word “heritage” is so often appended to hotels today that the term is becoming debased. There are a select few properties in Asia however, that befit the label – hotels in business for a century and more, dating back to the beginnings of tourism in the region.

A measure of this list is that the Peninsula in Hong Kong doesn’t make it – a relative newcomer at a mere 85 years old. The true grand dames include Bangkok’s Mandarin Oriental, the Sofitel Legend Metropole Hanoi and the Taj Mahal Palace in Mumbai. Also making the list are no less than four hotels – the Raffles in Singapore, the Eastern & Oriental in Penang, the Strand in Yangon and the Majapahit in Surabaya – built by one family, the Sarkies.

The Sarkies came to Asia from Isfahan in Persia – modern-day Iran – in the latter part of the 19th-century. Ethnically speaking, they were Armenians, their forebears brought to Isfahan by Shah Abbas the Great in the late 16th-century. In the style of the day, on becoming shah in 1588, he reinforced his rule by brutally replacing swathes of the hierarchy with captured Georgians, Circassians and Armenians. Many of the latter were settled in New Julfa, a suburb of Isfahan, among them the Sarkies family.

Soon after this, in the second half of the 17th-century, Western families of means began sending their young men – and some chaperoned young women – on what became known as the Grand Tour. It was also the beginning of tourism: the first time that travel on any scale was planned and undertaken for the purpose of enlightenment about the world beyond. It was laborious, costly and not a little dangerous but as the years passed, roads improved, and lodging houses and inns were upgraded until, in the early 19th-century, the first hotels as the Western world knows them (the Guinness Book of World Records recognises the Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan, founded in 705AD in Yamanashi, Japan, as the oldest hotel anywhere), began to appear.

In the second half of the 19th-century, Thomas Cook founded the world’s first travel agency. With Europe more widely accessible, the now-familiar search for the less beaten path began.

Even using newfangled steamships and railways, ‘taking passage’ to Asia, took weeks. Once there, the available lodgings suited local habits and diets, not those of pampered Westerners.