Astor House Hotel

The Astor House Hotel (浦江饭店, Pǔjiāng Fàndiàn; before 1959 礼查饭店, Lǐchá Fàndiàn) stands on the north bank of Suzhou Creek just east of Waibaidu Bridge. It began in 1846 as Richards’ Hotel, the first Western-run hotel in Shanghai, and since December 2018 the building has housed the China Securities Museum (中国证券博物馆, Zhōngguó Zhèngquàn Bówùguǎn).

The hotel’s first premises were south of the creek, near the Bund. The British merchant Richards opened it three years after the port opened to foreign trade. The founding meeting of the Committee on Roads and Jetties, the body that grew into the Shanghai Municipal Council, was held at the hotel, and later managers liked to remind guests of it. In 1857 or 1858, depending on the source, the hotel moved across the creek to its present site, and in 1859 it took the English name Astor House.

A string of firsts followed. On 26 July 1882 Shanghai tested its first fifteen electric lamps, seven of them at the Astor House and its garden. City sources also credit the hotel with Shanghai’s first telephone connection and the first open-air sound-film screening in China. Guests included Ulysses S. Grant in May 1879, Bertrand Russell in 1920, Albert Einstein in December 1922, and Charlie Chaplin in 1931 and 1936. According to the gazetteer, Einstein received the telegram announcing his Nobel Prize at the hotel on the night he arrived.

The present building dates from the rebuilding that followed the 1906 decision to replace the wooden Waibaidu Bridge with a steel one for trams. The bridge works took part of the hotel’s land, so the owners accepted compensation, demolished the forty-year-old building and rebuilt a few dozen metres to the north-east. The Shanghai gazetteer names Davies & Brooke (新瑞和洋行, Xīnruìhé Yángháng) as designers and Chou Zui Kee (周瑞记营造厂, Zhōuruìjì Yíngzàochǎng) as builders and gives 1907 for completion; English Wikipedia, drawing on newspapers of the time, says the rebuilt hotel reopened on 16 January 1911, and a city government page gives 1912. The result is a brick and reinforced-concrete block of 15,011 square metres in a neoclassical Baroque manner, with large arched windows, projecting balconies, and Ionic capitals on the columns between the third and fourth floors. The ground-floor hall, rebuilt in 1922, holds about 500 people.

In the 1920s the hotel passed to the Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels company. After fighting began in 1937 Western guests left, and the hotel was leased and then transferred to a Japanese company. The owners recovered it after 1945, when it served for a time as a US Navy club, and it went back to the British company in 1950. In 1959 the Shanghai municipality took it over and renamed it the Pujiang Hotel, for foreign visitors and overseas Chinese.

On 19 December 1990 the Shanghai Stock Exchange, the first securities exchange of the People’s Republic, opened in the hotel. Its trading floor was the Peacock Hall ballroom; the exchange later moved to Pudong.

The hotel closed at the end of 2017. The China Securities Museum, approved in January 2018 and run under the Shanghai Stock Exchange, opened in the building on 22 December 2018 and is free of booking for individual visitors. The building was listed in the third batch of Shanghai Outstanding Historical Buildings in 1999, and the district gazetteer counts it among the Bund Buildings group placed under national-level protection in 1996.