Cathay Hotel ‘Restoration’ – Cautiously Optomistic

The Financial Times has a piece on the reopening after a big refurbishment of the Cathay Hotel (renamed the Peace Hotel and now to he the Fairmont Peace Hotel)- the name it appears will not be restored. Lots of claims all round about how good and true the restoration has been – well, we’ll wait and see about that- we’ve heard the same guff many times before on various projects from the not bad Astor Hotel and the old abattoir to the vandalised No. 3 The Bund and others. Getting the Cathay back to original is now of course impossible as so much was stripped in previous dreadful and most unhelpful ‘restorations’ but a good approximation should be possible. Fairmont, the developers in bed with the state-controlled Jinjiang Group on the project say they want a ‘repositioning’ rather than a restoration as otherwise a full restoration would make it a ‘dowdy museum piece’. However, if you restore the hotel well it should be a return to what it was – the greatest hotel in Asia and a lot of fun. It was the post-1949 controller who turned it into a badly maintained, poorly run ‘dowdy museum piece’.

So here’s hoping the restoration will be good. In the FT Yang Weimin, the CEO of state-controlled Jin Jiang International Hotels, says the company must abide by historical preservation laws. Old Shanghai hands have of course heard that before. We’ll wait and see with fingers crossed. And why not go back to the Cathay Hotel and drop this Peace Hotel crap?