Palace Hotel (Swatch Art Peace Hotel)

The Palace Hotel (汇中饭店, Huìzhōng Fàndiàn) is the six-storey red-and-white building on the south corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road, built in 1906–1908 and for decades the Peace Hotel’s South Building. Since 2011 it has been the Swatch Art Peace Hotel (斯沃琪和平饭店艺术中心), an artists’ residence with watch boutiques at street level.

A hotel has stood here since 1854, when the three-storey Central Hotel (中央饭店, Zhōngyāng Fàndiàn) opened on the site; the municipal gazetteer calls it the most luxurious hotel in the city at the time, and the Hongkong and Shanghai Bank rented rooms in it for its Shanghai branch from 1865. In 1903, according to the gazetteer, the hotel changed hands and became the Palace Hotel, keeping the Chinese name Huizhong. In 1906 the old building was demolished and a six-storey replacement begun, designed by the British architect Walter Scott and built by the Chinese contractor Wang Fa Kee (王发记营造厂, Wángfājì Yíngzàochǎng). Sources disagree on when it was finished: the gazetteer gives 1906, while the hotel’s own history says it opened in 1908 and that the “1906” over the door is the date on Scott’s drawings. The hotel also records a fire in 1907 that damaged the unfinished building.

The building is brick with some concrete, about 30 metres high, in a European Renaissance manner: a granite-faced ground floor, walls of white facing tile banded with red brick, and windows capped by triangular or curved pediments. The entrance had a revolving teak door. The roof originally carried a garden and two Baroque pavilions at its east and west ends; a fire on the sixth floor in 1914 destroyed them, and the roof was rebuilt flat. Inside were two Otis lifts, which the gazetteer describes as the first passenger lifts in a Shanghai building, a ground-floor hall for 300 and a fifth-floor dining room for 250.

Two events give the building its place in history. From 1 to 26 February 1909 it hosted the International Opium Commission, the first international meeting on narcotics control, attended by 41 delegates from 13 countries and led on the Chinese side by the viceroy Duan Fang (端方, Duān Fāng). A plaque marking the site was unveiled on 25 November 1996. On 29 December 1911, after the Xinhai Revolution, the Tongmenghui held a welcome meeting for Sun Yat-sen (孙中山, Sūn Zhōngshān) in the hotel’s hall, where he gave a speech urging members to work on the people’s livelihood.

On 14 August 1937 one of two bombs dropped at this crossroads during the fighting in Shanghai hit the hotel’s roof. Japanese forces occupied the hotel after the outbreak of the Pacific War. It returned to its owners after 1945, was bought by a Chinese company in 1947, and closed in 1952, when the city’s construction bureau took it over. In 1965 it reopened as the South Building of the Peace Hotel, paired with Sassoon House across the road.

In 2007 the Swatch Group took on the building under a thirty-year agreement. A restoration approved in 2008 was finished in 2011, and the building reopened as the Swatch Art Peace Hotel: 18 workshop-apartments where invited artists live and work for three to six months, with Omega, Longines and Swatch boutiques on the ground floor. The entrance is on Nanjing Road East, not the Bund.