Hengshan Picardie Hotel

The Hengshan Picardie Hotel (衡山宾馆, Héngshān Bīnguǎn) is a fifteen-storey Art Deco apartment block of 1934 at the western end of Hengshan Road, built as the Picardie Apartments (毕卡第公寓, Bìkǎdì Gōngyù) and run as a hotel since the 1950s. Until the 1980s it was the tallest building in western Shanghai.

It was put up by the International Savings Society (万国储蓄会, Wànguó Chǔxùhuì), a French financial institution that operated in Shanghai between the wars and developed property through a subsidiary. The name is usually explained as a tribute to Picardy, the region of northern France; the hotel’s own account, as reported by English Wikipedia, links it instead to a French postal official, Henri Picard-Destelan. Accounts of the designer differ too, and none is well documented.

The block steps up from its wings to a taller central section, on a dark stone base with a lighter grey-white top. Inside were 87 apartments of two to five rooms, served by six passenger lifts and three goods lifts, with shops at street level. It filled within six months, largely with well-off foreign tenants, and a local paper nicknamed it the “international apartments”. The Society did not survive the Pacific War. It went into liquidation in 1945; the Nationalist government put the building up for auction, found no bidder, bought it cheaply itself and used it to house senior officers and their families.

In 1955 the municipal government refitted the building as a guesthouse, first for Soviet advisers, and it became the city’s first hotel for foreign guests after 1949. It took the name Hengshan Hotel in the late 1950s, with sources giving 1957 and 1960, and served for official reception; Xuhui district counts it among the six leading hotels of Shanghai in those decades. It opened to ordinary travellers in the 1980s, when an extension raised its height and a sightseeing lift was added. A 2008 refurbishment brought back the Picardie name in English.

The city listed the building as an Outstanding Historical Building in the second batch of 1994. The most recent renovation began at the end of 2020, the fifth in the building’s life, and set out to recover its 1930s appearance; by spring 2023 it was nearing completion, and the block was merged with the hotel next door to form the Hengshan Garden Hotel. The foyer keeps its geometric Art Deco motifs.