Her Lotus Year – the Grand Hotel de Pekin’s Dining Room

The first days of the new year of 1925 were to be when Wallis finally checked out of the Grand Hotel de Pekin & went to stay with her old friend Kitty Rogers in her sumptuous courtyard on Shih-Chia Hutong. At the Grand Hotel everything you could desire was on the upper floors after the lobby reception – Helen Burton’s Camel’s Bell boutique, the suites, the rooftop dance floor overlooking the Forbidden City, and the top floor dining room (here photographed in the 1920s by the American photographer John D Zumbrun who had a thriving studio in the Legation Quarter).