Excelsior Hotel will be just the latest luxury Hong Kong hotel to be knocked down for redevelopment
Since Hong Kong’s first luxury hotel was built in 1868, the city has seen many high-class hotels come and go, destroyed, by fire or torn down for redevelopment. Here are some classics from a bygone age
Hong Kong’s glitzy hotels of yesteryear, with their majestic furnishings and champagne-sipping patrons, were the epitome of luxury in the colonial era. For decades, foreigners residing in the British colony adopted them as second homes. Hotels were also places of merrymaking for expats and became an integral part of the city’s social fabric.
Today, Hong Kong has more hotels than ever, with everything from international brands to hip boutique hotels and themed Disney rooms. Last year, more than 26 million visitors stayed overnight in Hong Kong, most of them in the city’s 263 hotels and almost 75,000 rooms.
Due to redevelopment pressures, however, high occupancy rates do not guarantee long life. Here are six once-popular hotels that have come and gone over the decades.
The Hongkong Hotel
When Hong Kong’s first luxury hotel opened in 1868, it seemed to have everything: a grand staircase, London-style decor, and a prime location on Queen’s Road and Pedder Street. Before reclamation took place in Central, it was so close to Victoria Harbour that “you could fish from the hotel windows”, the Post commented.
The hotel got mixed reviews, however, from Scottish geographer John Thompson in his 1873-1874 book Illustrations of China and Its People, which described it as comfortable but with unexceptional fare. “The native waiters are remarkable ... for the fluency of pidgin English in which they converse,” he wrote. “This is, however, a jargon intelligible only to the residents.”
