The Excelsior Hong Kong Bows Out: A Hotel’s Greatest Draw Is Its People | Hong Kong Street Life ⑳

“Hong Kong Street Life” is a QDaily column by outside contributors, devoted to setting down, as quickly as it can, whatever sketches it can manage of a place that is changing fast.

After March 31, The Excelsior stood empty. Hoardings went up across the entrance, and walking past left you feeling hollow too.

A landmark that had stood over Victoria Harbour for half a century was no match for money and time. Mandarin Oriental International decided to close The Excelsior, spend HK$5 billion, and rebuild on the site a mixed-use commercial block of more than 60,000 square meters.

On the morning of October 9, 2018, no one on staff yet knew. As he had for thirty years, Liu Weirong (Samuel), a back-of-house supervisor, walked in through The Excelsior’s doors to start his shift, only to be stopped by security and told there was a meeting. He sensed something was wrong. Staff whispered among themselves until management suddenly called an all-hands that day and said there was an important announcement to make. What came was the bad news.

The guest rooms had only just been refurbished in September, and Wang Huaping (Steve), the concierge, was equally blindsided: “They told us it wouldn’t be torn down.” Xu Minyi (Alice), a housekeeping supervisor, is 57. She has given thirty years of her life to The Excelsior and had meant to stay until she retired. It took her several months to talk herself into accepting it: “None of us thought we’d live to see The Excelsior close in glory.”

A thousand things to say, all of them coming down to one: they didn’t want it to end.

The city outside felt the same regret. The Peninsula, at five stars, was out of reach; The Excelsior had only four, but its prices were within reach and it sat in the middle of a busy district, which earned it the nickname “the celebrities’ canteen.” Many Hongkongers chose it for the big occasions of their lives and grew attached to it. Guests were sentimental, staff stayed for decades, and regulars from around the world treated the place as home. On a return visit they would always ask whether so-and-so was still there, and often arrive with gifts from home.

Ask the three of them what made the hotel special and they answer in one voice: the warmth between people. For 46 years, long-serving staff were everywhere, and they held The Excelsior up. Of roughly 500 employees, 29% had been there more than ten years and 8% more than twenty; the longest tenure reached forty. The hotel held an all-staff meeting every quarter, and the queue for the long-service awards—ten years and up—always stretched down the room.

Turn the pages of its history and The Excelsior is bound up with Hong Kong people, and with the colony itself. Its Chinese name, Yee Tung, means “Jardine’s East Point,” according to the historian Zheng Baoyuan. In 1841, when Hong Kong opened as a port, the colonial government held its first land auction, and the winner was Jardine Matheson, the biggest and oldest British house in the Far East. The place was called East Point then. As the firm moved its weight to the mainland and changed strategy, the East Point site became in turn its headquarters, a mint, a sugar refinery, a shipyard, a warehouse, and a container terminal. Only in 1949, when the Chinese Communist Party took power and seized every one of the firm’s businesses and assets, did Jardine Matheson move its headquarters back to Hong Kong.

In the late 1960s the colonial government decided to build the Cross-Harbour Tunnel. Jardine Matheson saw money in it and gave the go-ahead for The Excelsior, which opened in 1973. It held a string of Hong Kong firsts: at 34 stories, the tallest hotel in the city; the hotel with the most rooms; the first to hire women as room attendants. Prince Charles stayed there on his 1979 visit, and other guests included the late television mogul Sir Run Run Shaw and the American singer Tony Bennett.

The closing marks the end of an era, and the end of a stage in the lives of the people who worked there.

At 11:59 p.m. on December 31, 2018, on the Jardine Noonday Gun platform on the Causeway Bay waterfront, Samuel kept his eyes on the countdown screen across Victoria Harbour—“3, 2, 1!” Beside him stood the general manager, Fan Lijie, and his wife. Samuel pulled the lanyard, the gun went off with a bang, fireworks opened overhead at the same instant, the crowd shouted Happy New Year, a waiter came around with champagne, and he raised a toast in the noise.

Looking back, he laughs: at that moment he was “so startled I can’t describe it. I couldn’t hear a thing.”

He was on edge because the Jardine Noonday Gun matters. Jardine Matheson owns it; it goes back to the 1840s, when it was set up against pirates, and it later became a time signal, fired at noon every day. The midnight ceremony on New Year’s Eve was always led by one of the group’s senior figures; only on the hotel’s big anniversaries did the firing pass to The Excelsior’s general manager. This was the hotel’s 45th year, and Samuel had just been named 2018 Employee of the Year, so the honor of officiating went to him as the old hand. In earlier years he had stood below the platform holding a tray of champagne and greeting guests, mocking himself as “the fool with the tray.” He had never dreamed he would be the one at the center, and he lay awake for several nights, afraid of getting it wrong.

It took thirty years at the hotel for Samuel to earn that place. In 1989, at 24, he became a bartender at Dickens Bar, named after the English novelist. The local jazz band Tony Carpio held the residency for eighteen years, and the bar was called the first home of jazz in Hong Kong. Leslie Cheung and other stars were regulars.

In 1993, with a cocktail of his own devising, he came through the trials to represent the hotel at the Beefeater bartending competition and took second place. He went on to Austria for the world final, and represented the hotel several more times. The years ran on. He was promoted, moved through one department after another, transferred to banqueting, and met and married his wife at The Excelsior. When the call came that his son had been born, he was working someone else’s wedding banquet, and left in a hurry by taxi.

Now one thing is on his mind: “A hundred workers means a hundred families behind them. Once this is pulled down, where do I go, where do all of us go?” The goodwill ran both ways, at least: The Excelsior worked hard to place its staff, and Samuel was taken on by a sister hotel in the group. After thirty years in one job, his only worry is that he won’t adjust to somewhere new.

Alice, the housekeeping supervisor, has the same question. Thirty years went by in a blink; she had planned to retire there. But nothing holds still, and even her arrival at The Excelsior was an accident.

Poor children grow up early. She was one of six, left school after Form 3, and started work at fifteen, spending years in garment factories, paid by the piece. Then in 1988, at 23, she went along to keep a friend company at an Excelsior hiring session. Both of them were interviewed, both were hired, and she changed trades.

The hotel opened with 1,003 rooms, more than any other in Hong Kong. In her first days Alice had seventeen rooms to do each day, half an hour each, and of course she was in a flap at the start. The routine ran all the way through: strip and make the bed, do the bathroom, dust, vacuum, then set out the furnishings to standard and clean every implement—not one hair could be left behind. When she didn’t know how to deal with foreign guests, she learned to answer first with a smile and fill in the rest with gestures. The hotel ran a three-month crash course in English, two lessons a week, and she gradually learned to answer guests’ questions in it.

She rose from room attendant to supervisor, taught patiently by seniors who were part mentor, part friend, and she took on their pride in the craft: “Housekeeping is a profession too.” Making a bed has its own body of knowledge, and three rules: neat, clean, no smell. “What matters is that the guest is comfortable. They walk in and the bed looks as if it has been ironed.”

Alice’s hands move fast and cleanly: one shake to snap out the tangled quilt and sheets, a palm run over the creases, then corner by corner, all in one pass. Three minutes, start to finish.

In the 1990s a school for the blind visited the hotel, and she had to talk them through making a bed. She was anxious. Fourteen students stood around the four-poster in the presidential suite. “I kept thinking, how do I ‘show’ them?” Beds then were made with three sheets around a blanket, four layers in all, and she explained what was different about each layer as she went. At the end the students walked around the bed and felt her work with their hands. She has never forgotten it.

The friend she was hired with stayed at the hotel too, and the two of them talk often about the old days. Alice had been counting down to the closing date, memories running on a loop, crying quietly at night. But you have to look ahead. She laughs and says that as long as her body holds up she will work until she retires: “Let’s see if any hotel will take me in.”

Steve, the concierge, feels it too, but less heavily. He plans to rest for a while, then start a small business with a friend. He talks fast and clean, the classic sharp Hong Kong man; a concierge stands at the very front, fielding the awkward requests of guests from every country, with no routine to fall back on and nothing but quick thinking.

Twenty-five years in, there is no awkward request Steve hasn’t seen. Lost valuables are routine. A French tourist rode a public bus out to Stanley on her own and left her wallet and passport behind; he phoned the bus depot and went with her to collect them, and she cried with happiness. The hardest job is finding tickets for guests during the Hong Kong Sevens each March. Even after they sell out he can work every line he has, calling concierges at other hotels, and most of the time he finds some. When the Hong Kong–Zhuhai–Macau Bridge opened, a guest asked him to arrange a car to go over and back between Hong Kong and Macau; finding a driver took two full weeks. There is only one thing he won’t do: “A guest says, ‘Get me a woman.’ I always refuse, because it’s illegal. You follow the hotel’s rules to the letter.” In Hong Kong, selling sex is legal, but organizing and controlling it is not.

The rest of the time, Steve says yes to whatever he can and delivers. Service work is hard, and being thanked by a guest is harder, but at The Excelsior it happened all the time. What kept the three of them here always comes back to the same thing: colleagues who are kind, and guests and staff at ease with one another. “Regulars treat you like family,” Steve says. In February a Filipino regular came for one last stay; the old man, who had had a stroke, hugged Steve and wept as he left. Back home he still couldn’t let go, and in March he came back with the whole family for one more stay.

At noon on the last day, the gun ceremony was led by the “final guest,” Paul Cheeseman from Britain, who over 27 years had come to The Excelsior on every visit to Hong Kong and spent 183 nights there. The general manager, Fan Lijie, thanked the staff: “People are what makes a hotel attractive.” At the last moment of the farewell, the staff gathered in the lobby and shouted: “We are Excelsior! Thank you for your support—we’ll meet again!”

Half a century of history ran out. The Excelsior began with the sound of the gun and ended with it. It closed in laughter and tears, and everyone scattered onto different roads. Only the gun goes on firing at noon. One shot sees out the old year; the affection stays, pressed into each of their lives. The people scatter; the feeling does not.

Cover image and photographs in the text are by the author unless otherwise noted.