How China's First International Hotels Became an Experiment in Architecture — and in Society

What did the first foreign investors, hotel operators and architects bold enough to try actually go through?

In 1982, I. M. Pei's experiment in Beijing's Fragrant Hills Park was not going well.

The Beijing municipal government had first picked a site beside the Forbidden City for the Chinese-American architect who had built the John Hancock Tower, hoping for a skyscraper hotel to house the foreign visitors pouring in now that the country had opened its doors. Pei said he had no wish to tear a hole in the fabric of the old city, and chose Fragrant Hills Park instead, far from the center. The client was unimpressed by the hotel he finally delivered, with its white walls and grey tiles. It did not look "modern" at all.

Dale Keller, who designed the interiors of the Fragrant Hills Hotel, remembers it no more fondly. The air conditioners were one of the standoffs. The client insisted that every unit be mounted where guests could see it, so that a single glance would prove this was a first-class place to stay. Keller wanted to hide the machinery and every other trace of human handiwork, so the rooms would sit comfortably inside Pei's Suzhou-garden scheme.

All of this is research material for Cole Roskam, an associate professor of architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Four years ago he began tracing the international hotels that went up across China in the first years of reform and opening, and the people who built them.

The signals of opening had started in the early 1970s, when China took back its seat at the United Nations and Nixon came to visit, and Chinese officials sent abroad came home astonished at how modern people lived. The ideal international hotel was a matter of height, room count, shape, facade, modern appliances, advanced building technique.

More than that, it was a message. "The more modern and the bigger a project looked — the better it proved that this country had come out from under the disaster of the Cultural Revolution and started on the Four Modernizations — the more government support it got," Roskam told QDaily.

What a Modern "Face" Was Supposed to Look Like

In 1978, more than 1.8 million travelers entered China — more than the previous twenty years put together. In 1979 the figure jumped past 4.2 million. Beijing had seven hotels licensed to take foreigners, and only 1,000 beds that met the standard. Everyone understood that the country urgently needed hotels built to international standards. Almost nobody knew what one should look like.

In 1979 the first three pilot projects using foreign capital were approved. No. 001 was the China Aviation Food Company; No. 002 and No. 003 were Beijing's Jianguo Hotel and Great Wall Hotel. The State Council set up a "Leading Group for Building Tourist Hotels with Overseas Chinese and Foreign Capital."

An international hotel was a small, self-contained, controllable space — a "mini special economic zone," in Roskam's phrase, where business could be done quietly in surroundings that were comfortable, modern, even sociable. Ordinary people, stopped at the gate, had no idea what went on inside. What they saw was one modern wonder after another, tall enough that your hat fell off if you looked up.

"What you've got is a guesthouse at best, not a hotel!" Clement Chan Jr., the man behind the Jianguo Hotel, said this to Hou Xijiu, then deputy director of the Beijing Municipal Tourism Bureau, in an argument over who would manage the place. The Chinese-American told him bluntly that Beijing's hotels were backward and that its managers had no experience worth the name. Roskam collected design sketches for the Beijing Hotel showing that Chinese designers had not even given the guest rooms their own bathrooms; the shared ones sat at the end of the corridor.

By the 1970s, Chan's 566-room hotel in San Francisco's Chinatown had become a standard stop for mainland officials visiting the United States. "The Jianguo is very nearly a copy of the San Francisco one — and a copy was exactly what the client wanted," Roskam said. The structure itself broke no new ground, and next to the east wing of the Beijing Hotel it was small.

But the Jianguo had the best hotel facilities of its day: a swimming pool, fountains, and Justine's, Beijing's first French restaurant. Every room had a color television and a dial telephone. "Chan knew exactly what Chinese construction could manage, and he knew what Chinese officials wanted. The Jianguo succeeded because it satisfied a whole set of ideas about what 'modern' meant."

It was an enormous success: occupancy stayed above 95 percent through its first year. Representatives of foreign banks lived there and ran their offices on the ground floor, and for a time people called it Beijing's "Wall Street."

Orville Schell described the world behind the Jianguo's doors at length in a 1983 piece for The New York Times:

"Tapestries covered every wall, and the rooms came with matching curtains and bedsheets whose plant patterns made you think not of China but of somewhere as far off as Greenland. The bathrooms were done in Chinese black-and-white marble — perhaps the last faint reminder that you were still in China. The king-size beds were imported from the United States, and there were color televisions, individual air conditioning, dial telephones, and American chandeliers on gold chains. Slide open the door onto the balcony and you could watch the light play on the fountain in the hotel garden's pool."

In Schell's words, when the guard pushed open the glass door for you, "China seemed to have been left behind, and you stepped into an entirely new world." What stayed outside was not only China's streets, its traffic and its air, but its people. "Chauffeurs waited by the fountain for tips, and beside them stood ordinary citizens, staring in through the plate glass at the bright lobby."

Besides towers and glass curtain walls, Chinese officials had one more idea of what modern looked like: a restaurant that turned a full circle every hour.

China's first revolving restaurant opened at the Jinling Hotel in Nanjing, and was called Xuangong. It was the third of its kind in the world, after the Hyatt Regency that John Portman designed and built in Atlanta in 1967 and Hong Kong's Hopewell Centre in 1981.

Roskam found one of the Hong Kong architects who worked on the design. At a design meeting he noticed several "partner representatives" who had come down from Beijing. They pushed hard to lower the Jinling's height and to drop the revolving restaurant altogether. "They probably wanted the most advanced technology, and the record for the country's tallest building, to happen in Beijing rather than Nanjing."

Xuangong sat on the 36th floor, served by China's first high-speed elevator: 29 seconds from the ground. Like every international hotel, the Jinling was closed to the public at first. People lined up to buy a ticket for Xuangong, and a waiter took them up to look out over the city.

Another witness to this history, and a later one, is the Shanghai Centre, better known as the Shanghai Portman.

The Portman was John Portman's. When China and the United States normalized relations in 1979, Deng Xiaoping stayed during his official visit at the Westin Peachtree Plaza in Atlanta, which Portman had designed and which was then the tallest building in the world. Soon afterwards Portman opened his first overseas office in Hong Kong.

In the firm's archives Roskam found the project's earliest drawings. It began as a straightforward hotel. Later versions turned it into a city within a city. After many rounds of revision, the final scheme was a 152.1-meter building shaped like the Chinese character for "mountain." Its eight-story podium held a 1,500-seat theater, a three-level shopping arcade, 30,000 square meters of high-end offices and an atrium exhibition space. Without leaving this miniature city you could get almost everything a city offers — housing, food, shopping, entertainment, business, culture, work. That compressed urban experience was what "modern" meant at the Shanghai Portman.

The Shanghai Centre was first meant for the Bund, but the soil there was too soft. Officials and architects settled instead on a site just north of the Sino-Soviet Friendship Building — today's Shanghai Exhibition Centre — a Cold War-style building begun in 1955, with which the Shanghai Centre shares a north-south axis.

"Officials were deeply unsure about this group of hotels. They could not tell how far these mini special economic zones would affect the neighborhoods around them, or the wider city. Would these quiet changes set off a change in the city itself? That was a challenge for the people running things, and nobody could predict it," Roskam said.

The Architects' Challenges, and Their Confusion

The Fragrant Hills Hotel was Pei's first project after his return to China. One member of the team, describing how seriously he took it, said: "It was the first time I ever saw him join the discussion at the sketch stage."

Pei had left China at 18 and came back in his fifties. At Fragrant Hills he was after a "modernity" that carried the values of traditional Chinese building.

The hotel is made of three- and four-story wings wrapped around a central hall, next to cedars, cypresses and spruces centuries old. Roskam admires the nerve it took to try for something local. "For Chinese people just out of the Cultural Revolution, history and tradition were sensitive subjects. Anyone who had lived through 'Destroy the Four Olds' would instinctively hear feudal leftovers."

Pei's borrowings from traditional Chinese architecture set off fierce argument among architects and scholars at the time, not least because he had moved a Jiangnan style north. Some read his use of the imperial period's architectural language as a breakthrough, a way back into architectural history and traditional culture. Others held that China's modernization needed buildings that were technically more advanced and visually more striking, and that this was where world-famous architects like Pei should be contributing — though today, planting a wholly foreign Suzhou-garden aesthetic in Beijing looks less like local architecture than like a mash-up.

"You have to remember that these buildings came out of a very sensitive moment, the start of reform and opening, when the Party had reformers and relative conservatives arguing without end over how fast, how far and by what means to reform," Roskam said.

The harder question was whether any of the architects' drawings could actually be built.

Language was one problem. Roskam interviewed an American who worked on the Great Wall Hotel for Unison Group, one of its investors; his fluent Chinese made him the interpreter between the American architects from Becket and the Chinese builders. Many people did that job full-time on these projects.

Language barriers could be got around. Differences in culture and in building technique could not, so easily. Roskam gives the example of running cable: the Americans laid conduit first and poured concrete over it, while Chinese workers poured the cement first, then chiseled out a channel to bury the cable when the time came to install it, and sealed the cement back up.

The Great Wall Hotel, built between 1981 and 1984, had in fact been drawn with a revolving restaurant on its roof — well before the Jinling's — but Chinese workers did not have the technique for it, and after repeated attempts it came to nothing. Both sides were exasperated, and the plan was dropped.

"Bringing American workers onto a Chinese building site would obviously have been far too sensitive," Roskam said.

The World Behind the Doors

The international hotels of this period were less a service industry than a testing ground. The modern interiors, the facilities and the business conducted in them all happened quietly indoors, out of sight of ordinary people. Every hotel of the era kept a strict door policy: the people who walked in were foreigners and officials, or investors from Hong Kong and Singapore.

Roskam interviewed a journalist who grew up in Nanjing. She remembers her parents taking her across the city as a child just to look at the tall building. They knew there was a restaurant at the top that turned. They could not get into the lobby.

Schell called the closely guarded Jianguo "An Oasis of Privilege in China." He reached Clement Chan Jr., who told him frankly over the telephone: "If I opened the doors, thousands of people would come in for a cup of tea and then sit around all day in the free air conditioning. You cannot run a first-class international hotel that way."

Roskam has cited a 1981 story in Beijing Daily, "The Beijing Hotel Keeps Up Its Education Against Corrosive Influences," describing how the Beijing Friendship Hotel, training its Chinese staff, told them to build up their "immunity" — especially toward things guests left behind in their rooms, such as "pornographic publications" like Playboy.

The government was trying to build visual symbols of modernity and to hide the side effects of reform at the same time. "But it was hard for Chinese people not to notice the spatial and social change roaring along beside them, and many came to resent being shut out of these new giants."

The Jianguo was held up as a model. In 1984 the People's Daily ran it as the lead story on the front page, analyzing its business model and praising its founder for bringing in Hong Kong's Peninsula Group to train the staff and run the hotel. The National Tourism Administration then launched a nationwide campaign: "Every Hotel Learns From the Jianguo."

Foreign celebrities were the first international hotels' first guests. Nixon, Andy Warhol, Elizabeth Taylor and Gregory Peck all stayed at the Beijing Hotel. In 1981 Pierre Cardin staged his first fashion show open to the public there. Two years later he opened a branch of Paris's Maxim's on the second floor of the Chongwenmen Hotel. Until then Beijing's only Western restaurants were Russian: "Lao Mo" and the Xinqiao Hotel among them. A French dinner at Maxim's cost over a hundred yuan, when an ordinary city dweller earned a few dozen yuan a month.

Beijing's international hotels were also where rock musicians got to play. As the joke went, "rock music isn't close to the people; rock music is close to Maxim's." Cui Jian and his contemporaries performed there in their early years, and foreign tourists were their first audience.

One exception was the White Swan Hotel in Guangzhou, built with a US$50 million investment from Henry Fok, and described as a hotel for ordinary people.

Behind its diamond-shaped structure were 1,000 rooms and an intricate three-story atrium holding an indoor waterfall and pavilions and pools in imperial style. The first hotel of the early reform years designed entirely by Chinese architects, it also brought in a computerized hotel management system, advanced for its day.

The White Swan opened to the public comparatively early. Some people made the trip just to look at its new bathrooms. Roskam curated an exhibition, "Space Reform: International Hotels in China 1974–1990," at the University of Hong Kong's Shanghai study center, where he showed a 1986 White Swan wedding invitation he had turned up on secondhand sites like Kongfz. By the middle of the 1980s the hotel was renting out its rooms for events.

In 1991, American citizens were allowed to adopt children from China. The White Swan stood close to the US Consulate General in Guangzhou, and most adoptive parents stayed there to make the paperwork easier. People started calling it the Baby Hotel. It worked with the toy company Mattel to put strollers in the adopters' rooms and a children's play area in the public spaces.

And Then They Were Forgotten

Thirty years on, the international hotels people once queued outside seem to have been forgotten. You can still book them on Trip.com Group or TripAdvisor, but the words that come up most often in the reviews are "old-fashioned," "dated facilities" and "arrogant service."

Early building technology tends to leave expensive maintenance and renovation behind it. Pei's John Hancock Tower, glass panels falling off it, once produced a strange repair crew: men standing in the street with binoculars, watching each pane for a change of color so they could catch a failing sheet of glass before it fell.

China's first tower-block hotels went up before most cities had written fire codes for high-rises; the White Swan was ordered at one point to bring itself up to standard. Some of the hotels, now listed as immovable cultural relics, cannot easily add underground parking, and when they came to be rebuilt, the original drawings had either not been kept or bore little resemblance to what had actually been built.

The hotel boom came with a push to train people to run hotels. The Peninsula Group managed the Jianguo and trained its staff for its first five years. As early as 1980 a first group of five state-sponsored students left to study hotel management at a school of travel industry management in Hawaii. In 1982 the Lido Training School opened, the first vocational college a Chinese hotel had run itself; it took 530 students in its first intake, and after two years of training the first graduates went out to break ground at hotels around the country.

The Lido Hotel was built by the wealthy Singaporean Chinese businessman Luo Xinquan with 80 million yuan, later topped up to 200 million. In 1994 Luo handed the Lido to Li Ka-shing. This was the template for nearly all the international hotels: foreign or overseas Chinese money, Chinese government labor, land or part of the funding, and architects supplying the technique.

Still, vocational hotel training on the mainland went neglected and underrated for years. The Fragrant Hills Hotel was run by the Chinese government; the Jianguo brought in the Peninsula's professional team to train and manage its staff, and so did the Great Wall.

Once China joined the WTO, this first cohort of Sino-foreign joint ventures had almost no answer to the international hotel groups coming after them, or to the domestic brands. More than thirty management groups — Holiday Inn, Sheraton, Hilton, Accor, Shangri-La, Peninsula, Hyatt — had been in the Chinese market since the late 1980s, and they were nimbler and more aggressive.

After that the international hotels were held back by how they were set up. Most were joint ventures, roughly 51 percent Chinese and 49 percent foreign, on contracts of 10 to 20 years, after which control was to be negotiated back into state hands. Whether any of them could keep up with the market depended on the hotel.

The old Shanghai Centre, now The Portman Ritz-Carlton, Shanghai, hired Gensler in 2016 to design The Ritz Bar & Lounge off the lobby, hoping the public space would draw people in. On Trip.com you can still read complaints about the tired guest rooms behind all that finery.

The Fragrant Hills Hotel has come off worse. Because of its history it still takes a steady stream of conferences; the Beijing Tourism Bureau has not managed it well and has let the building go, and Pei never went back to the hotel he had followed from the first sketches.

That is how it ended for the hotels that once stood for openness, and for argument.

Cover image from the Shanghai Center of Photography