Her Lotus Year: The Kowloon Hotel, Hong Kong

Posted: September 27th, 2025 | No Comments »

Around the time of the Japanese invasion and occupation of Hong Kong in December 1941 American journalist Gwen Dew stayed for a time in the Kowloon Hotel on Hankow Road in Tsim Sha Tsui. She did not know the provenance of the room she was assigned, but recalls the tale in her 1943 bestselling memoir Prisoner of the Japs…

‘The room which I managed to secure was a very large, pleasant one on the corner with two beds!… The only trouble was that shrapnel had broken all the windows, and it was very cold, particularly at night. That was why no one else had wanted to move into that refrigerator.’

‘Imagine my amazement and amusement when I was told that about twenty years before, this had been the room of the Duchess of Windsor, then Mrs Winfield Spencer. The hotel had been new, and was used by the (US) Navy a great deal. Here she had lived with her husband, who was attracted to the sea forces. Times had certainly changed, but I used to converse with “Wally’s” ghost during sleepless nights and tried to picture what happy times might have been spent in this room years before.’

Dew clearly didn’t know Wallis’s history of being lonely, abused and sad in the Kowloon Hotel…

Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson is available everywhere in hardback, e-book and audiobook now…

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