Chronicle No. 61 · Places
The Finest Hotel East of Suez, and the Christmas It Changed Hands
The Peninsula opened in 1928 as Kowloon's grandest address. On Christmas Day 1941 a governor walked in and surrendered a colony.
When the Kadoorie family opened The Peninsula in Tsim Sha Tsui on 11 December 1928, the ambition was stated plainly: the finest hotel east of Suez. Italianate outside, Edwardian and Second Empire in the lobby, it faced the harbour and the ships that fed it.
Thirteen years later the ambition was beside the point.
On 25 December 1941 — Christmas Day — the British Governor of Hong Kong, Sir Mark Aitchison Young, walked into The Peninsula and surrendered the colony at the Japanese headquarters set up on the third floor. He was held in a suite in the hotel for two months before being moved to Shanghai. The Peninsula was renamed the Tōa Hotel and reserved for Japanese officers and dignitaries.
The name came back when the British did.
What the hotel did afterwards is the part hospitality people should study. It kept being itself, at scale:
- A 30-storey tower in 1994, taking the house to 300 rooms while the original façade and lobby stayed exactly where they were.
- A rooftop helipad, seven minutes from the airport.
- Since December 2006, a fleet of 14 long-wheelbase Rolls-Royce Phantoms in custom Peninsula green — the largest single order in the company's history.
- A HK$450 million refurbishment in 2012 that modernised the bedrooms and left the lobby and Gaddi's alone.
A century of adding towers around a lobby it refuses to change. That is not nostalgia. That is knowing precisely which part of the business is load-bearing.
“the finest hotel east of Suez”
Lesson: Grand houses survive occupation and recession; what they cannot survive is losing the one thing guests come back for.
