Sassoon House (Fairmont Peace Hotel)

Sassoon House (沙逊大厦, Shāxùn Dàshà) is the granite tower with the green pyramid roof on the north corner of the Bund and Nanjing Road. It was built for the property developer Victor Sassoon and opened in 1929 with the Cathay Hotel (华懋饭店, Huámào Fàndiàn) on its upper floors; since 1956 it has been the Peace Hotel (和平饭店, Hépíng Fàndiàn), now run by Fairmont. At 77 metres it was the tallest building on the Bund when it was finished.

The Sassoon trading house bought this corner plot in the 1870s. Victor Sassoon, a hereditary baronet who had been wounded flying with the Royal Air Force in the First World War, took over the family firm E.D. Sassoon & Co. (新沙逊洋行, Xīn Shāxùn Yángháng) in 1918 and came to Shanghai in 1923 to run it, putting its money into real estate. Sassoon House was the first tall building he put up in the city.

Work began in 1926 after the older Sassoon buildings on the site were pulled down, and the tower was completed in 1929. Palmer & Turner designed it; the Chinese contractor Sin Jin Kee (新仁记营造厂, Xīnrénjì Yíngzàochǎng) built it on a steel frame supplied by Dorman Long of London. The plan is A-shaped, with nine storeys plus a basement on the Nanjing Road side rising to thirteen on the river side. The walls are faced in granite, the first use of a granite facade on the Bund, except for the ninth floor and the top, which are finished in stone tiles. The pyramid on the river front is 19 metres high and clad in corrugated copper painted dark green.

The building was never only a hotel. Two banks rented the ground floor along the Bund, shops lined Nanjing Road, and an octagonal inner hall with a stained-glass dome sat where the two ground-floor passages crossed. E.D. Sassoon’s own offices took the third and fourth floors. The Cathay Hotel occupied floors five to nine. Its rooms were decorated in national styles: German, Indian, Spanish and Japanese on the fifth floor, French, Italian and American on the sixth, Chinese and English on the seventh, with a Chinese restaurant, bar and ballroom on the eighth and a nightclub on the ninth. Sassoon lived on the tenth floor. The hotel’s main entrance was on Nanjing Road, and it still is.

On 14 August 1937, the day after fighting began in Shanghai, two bombs fell at the junction of the Bund and Nanjing Road, one on the roof of the Palace Hotel opposite and one in the road outside the Cathay; 729 people were killed. During the Pacific War the Japanese-controlled authorities seized the building. After 1949 the city’s finance committee used it as offices, and the municipal government took it over in 1952. It reopened as the Peace Hotel in 1956. In 1965 the former Palace Hotel across Nanjing Road became its South Building, and this one the North Building.

The hotel closed in 2007 for its first full restoration in eighty years, designed by the Shanghai Institute of Architectural Design. The team reconnected a two-storey corridor that earlier occupants had cut into sections, cleared later additions from the octagonal atrium, and kept and repainted the original copper roof. It reopened in 2010 as the Fairmont Peace Hotel. Jin Jiang, which has owned the property since 1984, and Accor announced in May 2025 that it will be renovated again and reopen under the Raffles name in 2027, staying open meanwhile. A Peace Museum on the ground floor, run by the hotel, traces the building’s history from 1929; it opens daily, with guided tours that are free for hotel guests. The Old Jazz Band plays nightly in the Jazz Bar, once called the Horse and Hound.