The Astor House Hotel, known as the Pujiang Hotel (浦江饭店) in Chinese from 1959–2018, was described as once "one of the famous hotels of the world". Established in 1846 as Richards' Hotel and Restaurant (礼查饭店) on The Bund in Shanghai, it was located at 15 Huangpu Lu, Shanghai, near the confluence of the Huangpu River and the Suzhou Creek in the Hongkou District, near the northern end of the Waibaidu (Garden) Bridge, from 1858 on. The hotel closed on 1 January 2018, after being purchased by an undisclosed local business.Based on information provided by hotel front-desk staff and reservation hotline It was converted to the China Securities Museum, which opened in December 2018.
Location The Astor House Hotel has been on the North Bund of Shanghai, by the northern end of the Waibaidu Bridge () (the Garden Bridge in English), since 1858. The hotel is on a site and has a total building area of with 134 rooms and suites.Property Details: It was a landmark in the Hongkou District and the centre of foreign social life before the opening of the Cathay Hotel.Stella Dong, Shanghai: The Rise and Fall of a Decadent City 1842–1949 (New York: HarperCollins, 2001):208. It occupies an entire block, and is across the road from the Russian Consulate. Previously, the consulates of Germany, the United States and Japan were also located in row up the row from the Hotel.
Background On 29 August 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing declared Shanghai to be one of five open treaty ports in China, the others being Guangzhou, Amoy, Fuzhou, and Ningbo.See Francis Pott, A Short History of Shanghai (Kelly & Walsh); On 17 November 1843, Shanghai was declared open to foreign traders, and soon after the British concession in Shanghai was established and the boundaries gradually defined.Pott; Afterward, the resident foreign population of the British concession increased: "In 1844 [at years end] it was 50, in the following year 90, and after five years it had grown to 175. In addition there was a 'floating population,' consisting of the men on shore from the ships in harbour."
Richards' Hotel and Restaurant (1846–1859)
Among the first foreign residents of Shanghai was Peter Felix Richards, a Scottish merchant. Richards had been doing business in China from about 1840;See P.F. Richards, 17 March 1861 from Tientsin, published in North-China Herald (6 April 1861). and in 1844 had established P.F. Richards & Co. (of Shanghai and Fuzhou).Mark Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 2008):104; Papers of miscellaneous companies, 1823–1940 (Manuscripts/MS JM/MS.JM/I28), Jardine Matheson Archive, P.F. Richards operated a general store, a ship chandler, and a commissioned agent businessHibbard, Bund, 212; Shanghai Almanac and Miscellany (1856):111, where Richards is listed as "Ship Chandlers, General Store-keeper, Shipping Victuallers." on 4th Avenue (四马路) (now Fuzhou Road; 福州路). In 1846, Richards opened one of the first Western restaurants in ShanghaiMark Swislocki, Culinary Nostalgia: Regional Food Culture and the Urban Experience in Shanghai (Stanford University Press, 2008):107. and the first Western hotel in China.Note: Hibbard suggests that the Hotel was established in 1844. See Hibbard, Bund, 212. These were located south of the Yangkingpang (Yangjingbang) creek.Richards' Hotel and Restaurant (礼查饭店; "Licha"; Lee-zo).Teikoku Tetsudōchō, Japan, An Official Guide to Eastern Asia: Trans-Continental Connections between Europe and Asia Vol. 4 (Imperial Japanese Government Railways, 1915):233.
Peter Felix Richards (1846–1859) The hotel was "a single and ordinary building"George Lanning and Samuel Couling, The History of Shanghai (The Shanghai Municipal Council; Shanghai: Kelly & Walsh, 1921):434–435. built in the Baroque style, which initially targeted the seafaring clientele that made up the bulk of travelers to 19th century Shanghai. One contemporaneous account describes corridors and floors whose color and design echoed those on ships. Almost a century later, John B. Powell erroneously recounted the origins of the Hotel: "The Astor House Hotel ... had grown from a boarding house established originally by the skipper of some early American clipper, who left his ship at Shanghai.John B. Powell, My Twenty Five Years in China (1945; Reprint: Read Books, 2008):7. A string of sea captains followed the original as managers of the hotel.Rob Gifford, China Road: A Journey into the Future of a Rising Power (Random House, 2007):4. The very first public meeting of the British settlement was held in the newly opened Richards' Hotel on 22 December 1846."Some Pages in the History of Shanghai, 1842–1856", The Asiatic Review [East India Association] 9–10 (1916):129; George Lanning and Samuel Couling, The History of Shanghai Part 1 (Shanghai: For the Shanghai Municipal Council by Kelly. & Walsh, Limited, 1921; 1973 ed.):290; J.H. Haan, "Origin and Development of the Political System in the Shanghai International Settlement", Journal of the Hong Kong Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 22 (1982):38; In August 1850 Richards advertised that a reading room for shipmasters had been established in his hotel."Notice", North-China Herald (17 August 1850):1. On 1 March 1856 his company was renamed "Richards & Co." and on 15 May 1856, while in New York on business, Richards' company was declared insolvent by decree of the British Consular Court in Shanghai,Swabey, 399. and all of his assets (including the Richards' Hotel) were assigned provisionally to his creditors, Britons William Herbert Vacher and Charles Wills.
According to Shanghai historian Peter Hibbard, the completion of the Wills Bridge allowed the expansion of the over-crowded settlement. Wills, who owned the land on the northern side of Suzhou Creek, benefited from increased property values.Hibbard, Bund, 53. During 1857 Wills leased a lot that was slightly larger than 22 mu () in a section of reclaimed mud flats in Hongkew"Hongkew then was low and swampy, with the present Broadway the fore-shore of the Whangpoo river. See "All About Shanghai: Chapter 1 – Historical Background", Tales of Old Shanghai, east of Broadway (now Daming Lu) on the northern banks of the Soochow Creek, that was adjacent to the new bridge, and faced the Suzhou Creek near its confluence with the Huangpu River, "at a huge profit for the building of the Astor House Hotel." In February 1858 Richards' store and the Richards Hotel and Restaurant were relocated to the site leased from Charles Wills on the northern banks of the Suzhou Creek. The new Hotel was a two-story East India style building.Hibbard, Bund, 212.
The Astor House Hotel (1859–1959)
In February 1858 Richards' store and the Richards Hotel and Restaurant were relocated to the site leased from Charles Wills on the northern banks of the Suzhou Creek, near its confluence with the Huangpu River in the Hongkou District of Shanghai. By 1859 the hotel was renamed (in English) the Astor House Hotel,"OF FOREING (sic) RESIDENTS AND MERCANTILE FIRMS AT SHANGHAI", The Hongkong Directory: With List of Foreign Residents in China 2nd ed. (The "Armenian Press", 1859):76, 90 while retaining the original Chinese name until 1959.
The Astor House Hotel was sold to Englishman Henry W. Smith on 1 January 1861;P.F. Richards, "Notice", North-China Herald (29 December 1860):1. Richards and his wife were still residents of the Astor House when their seven-year-old daughter died on 10February 1861.E. S. Elliston, Shantung Road Cemetery, Shanghai, 1846–1868: With Notes About Pootung Seamen's Cemetery [and] Soldiers' Cemetery (Millington, 1946):26. According to an 1862 guidebook, at that time the building also housed a "soda-water maker" by the name of F. Farr.
By October 1868 George Baker was the proprietor of the Astor House.North-China Herald (27 October 1868):8; North-China Herald (15 February 1870):14; J. Small, "Notes From My Diary", Wellington Independent [New Zealand] XXVIII (16 May 1872):3. By August 1873 it had been purchased by DeWitt Clinton Jansen.Hibbard indicates the date of purchase was 1884, seeBund, 212, and Darwent suggests a much earlier date than that: "It was founded by Mr. DC Jansen in 1860." See Charles Ewart Darwent, Shanghai: A Handbook for Travellers and Residents to the Chief Objects of Interest in and Around the Foreign Settlements and Native City 2nd ed. (Kelly & Walsh, 1920):62.
Enlargement (1876)
In 1876 the Astor House Hotel was enlarged,Hibbard, Bund, 212. with fifty new rooms added that were often used to accommodate newly arrived families who were awaiting the completion of their own residences.Hibbard, Bund, 213. After the 1876 expansion the hotel was "four large neo-Renaissance brick buildings linked together by stone passageways." American travel writer Thomas Wallace Knox (1835–1896) stayed there in 1879, providing a positive review in his Boy Travellers in the Far East.Thomas Wallace Knox, The Boy Travellers in the Far East, Part First: Adventures of Two Youths in a Journey to Japan & China (New York: Harper, 1879):319–320.
In January 1877 plans were announced to construct Victorian Turkish baths on the Seward Road frontage as part of the expansion of the Astor House.North-China Herald (11 January 1877):5. In 1881 Jansen renewed his lease of the Astor House Hotel with the trustees of the Wills' Estate for a period of thirty years.North-China Herald (28 February 1890):4 (232). In July 1882, the Astor House Hotel became the first building in China to be lit by electricity,Hanchao Lu, "Out of the Ordinary: Implications of Material Culture and Daily Life in China", in Everyday Modernity in China, ed. Madeleine Yue Dong and Joshua L. Goldstein (University of Washington Press, 2006):26. and in 1883 it became the first building in Shanghai to install running water.George Moerlein, A Trip Around the World (M. & R. Burgheim, 1886):59.
In 1882 the Astor House hosted the first Western circus in China. By the end of 1887, the Astor House was described by Simon Adler Stern as "the principal American hotel in Shanghai"Simon Adler Stern, Jottings of Travel in China and Japan (1888):121. The Astor House Hotel was "a landmark of the white man in the Far East, like Raffles Hotel in Singapore."Barbara Baker and Yvette Paris, eds., Shanghai: Electric and Lurid City : an Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998):100.
During 1889, The Shanghai Land Investment Company Limited (SLIC), which was formed in December 1888, purchased the "extensive estate known as the Wills' Estate, which includes the site of the Astor House Hotel, and possesses one of the best business situations in Hongkew" for 390,000 taels, approximately US$290,000."The Proposed Land Investment Co., Limited", North-China Herald (7 December 1888):17 (637); "Advertisement", North-China Herald (14 December 1888):22 (666). By the end of November 1889 Jansen agreed with the Shanghai Land Investment Company to transfer the Astor House Hotel and its land to the proposed Shanghai Hotel Company (SHC).North-China Herald (29 November 1889):3 (889). To allow for the expansion of the Astor House and the construction of a new one-hundred bedroom hotel and large assembly hall, the SHC would also purchase the land at the back of the Hotel, so that the property would extend from Whangpoo (Huangpu) Road to Broadway, and from Astor Road to Seward Road.
By 1890, "For foreigners the Astor House was the center of social activity."Emily Hahn, The Soong Sisters (E-Reads Ltd, 2003):15. Renovations to the Astor Hall were completed in time for the annual St. Andrew's Ball on Wednesday, 30 November 1892."The St. Andrew's Ball", North-China Herald (2 December 1892):17. In 1894 the Astor House was described as a "first class hotel in all these words imply" and was listed in Moses King's Where to Stop.": A Guide to the Best Hotels of the World.Moses King, ed., Where to Stop.": A Guide to the Best Hotels of the World (1894):110.