Jin Jiang Hotel

The Jin Jiang Hotel (锦江饭店, Jǐnjiāng Fàndiàn) occupies two 1930s apartment towers built by Sir Victor Sassoon’s property companies: Cathay Mansions (华懋公寓, Huámào Gōngyù) of 1929 on Changle Road and Grosvenor House (峻岭公寓, Jùnlǐng Gōngyù) of 1935 behind it on Maoming South Road. Since 1951 the complex has been a state guesthouse, and in February 1972 it was where the Shanghai Communiqué was signed.

Cathay Mansions came first. The Cathay Land Company, owned by Sassoon, engaged Arnhold & Company to build a residential hotel on the American skyscraper model, planned at eighteen storeys on ground that had never carried anything so tall. The thirteen-storey block finished in 1929 is now the hotel’s north building. Wikipedia credits the design to the British practice Palmer & Turner (公和洋行, Gōnghé Yángháng), though no primary source for that attribution was found.

Grosvenor House followed. Also a Sassoon property, it was designed by Palmer & Turner as a steel-framed modernist tower with vertical bands on the main facade and Art Deco detailing in places. Its central block rises to eighteen or nineteen storeys, depending on the source, and the wings step down towards the ends. The city’s heritage registers date it to 1935; Wikipedia gives 1934.

After 1949 the two buildings passed to the city. On 9 June 1951 the municipal government established the Jin Jiang Hotel in Cathay Mansions as the first state guesthouse of the new Shanghai. The name came from the Jinjiang Sichuan restaurant and tea house of Dong Zhujun (董竹君, Dǒng Zhújūn), the restaurateur who moved her businesses into the building and became the hotel’s first chairman; the Jinjiang hotel group of today traces its name to her restaurant at this address. Grosvenor House was renamed the Maoming Apartments and later became the hotel’s middle building, now called the VIP building. In 1959 a low red-brick hall, the Jinjiang Small Auditorium, was built on the lawn between the two towers, and a plenum of the Party’s Central Committee met in it that year.

That hall is why the hotel appears in diplomatic history. When President Richard Nixon visited China in February 1972, Shanghai was his last stop and his party stayed here, Nixon and his wife in the sixteenth-floor suite of the VIP building. On the afternoon of 27 February, Zhou Enlai came to the suite and went over the final wording of the joint communiqué with Nixon and Henry Kissinger; the two sides then walked to the Small Auditorium to sign it. Published the next day as the Shanghai Communiqué, it opened the way to normal relations between China and the United States. Nixon stayed in the hotel again on return visits in 1982 and 1993, and on the later visit told former staff in the same hall that China–US relations had started from there.

Both towers were listed in Shanghai’s first batch of Outstanding Historical Buildings in 1989 and as municipal protected sites the same year. The hotel still operates, and the grounds and lobbies are those of a working guesthouse rather than a museum.