Her Lotus Year, Shanghai’s Palace Hotel

Wallis’s Shanghai bolthole for a few weeks in the late autumn of 1924 was the Palace Hotel. Newly separated from her first husband, she stepped out onto the Bund and into town – the race club, Nanking Road shopping, cocktails. But she also saw the dead and wounded of the 1924 Second Zhili–Fengtian War being brought into the city by train from the battlefields nearby. And how could she afford to stay in the Palace – then the most expensive hotel in town? Well you’ll need to read Her Lotus Year I’m afraid….