The Raffles, Penang’s E&O, the Metropole in Hanoi – famous writers’ favourite Asian hotels, and how they celebrate their literary legacy
- Kipling paid the The Raffles a backhanded compliment, Noel Coward praised the sangfroid of staff at the Metropole, Somerset Maugham was everywhere
- Today, heritage hotels have suites named after illustrious former guests, and one has launched a writers’ residency programme to keep up the literary link
Writers once travelled through Asia in a leisurely fashion, steamers gently rolling between Bangkok and Batavia, rickshaws wheeling through the streets of Singapore, pleasure boats pulling into Penang.
European wanderers, adventurers and authors drank gin slings while waiting for sumptuous dinners; colonial matrons sipped tea on hotel balconies; and the business of empire rumbled on.
Colonial Asia (or the Far East, as it was then known) was replete with hotels for the well off, and well travelled novelists in search of rich material. Rudyard Kipling, Somerset Maugham, Joseph Conrad all added spice to their writing while spending time in Asia.
Today a number of these grand establishments are still standing.
The Raffles in Singapore, the Oriental (now known as the Mandarin Oriental) in Bangkok, the Metropole in Hanoi, the Strand in Rangoon (Yangon) and the Eastern and Oriental in Penang all hosted writers of varying calibre.
The hotels’ literary heritage is now seen as an added attraction, played up in bars and lounges, or with suites named for famous authors, and with marketing material pinpointing the writers’ occasional mention of the hotels (their sometimes pungent criticisms, on the other hand, are ignored), and sometimes merely the fact they may, or may not, have stayed in them.