Shanghai Peace Hotel

Shanghai Peace Hotel is a landmark on Nanjing Road whose architectural grandeur and layered history frame Margaret Campbell’s return to Shanghai. The hotel first appears as an emblem of the city’s cosmopolitan past; for Margaret, however, its imposing elegance becomes the setting for a private, painful homecoming that ends in solitude.

Architecture and History

The hotel stands at the corner of Nanjing Road, a fourteen-storey stone structure capped by a steep green copper roof. Formerly the Cathay Hotel, it had been regarded as the most luxurious hotel in the East. Its Art Deco design remains striking, giving the building a monumental presence within the surrounding streetscape.

That history is part of the hotel’s atmosphere rather than a detached account of its past. The name Cathay evokes the earlier hotel and the city’s international grandeur, while the building’s continued magnificence makes that inherited identity visible in the present. The hotel thus serves as both a functioning address and a surviving architectural marker of Shanghai’s changing eras.

Margaret’s Arrival

After arriving in Shanghai, Margaret is able to book into the hotel quickly and have her cases taken to her room. She has little time to absorb its interior: polished mahogany frames tall arched windows, while stained-glass galleries, wrought-iron lamp holders, and pink glass uplighters fill the public spaces with elaborate detail. The richness of the surroundings is immediately interrupted when Li Yan hurries her back into the rain.

The hotel also anchors a precise contrast between accommodation and public spectacle. The press conference takes place at the Peace Palace Hotel directly across Nanjing Road, not at Margaret’s hotel. The neighboring venue—once the old Palace Hotel and recently acquired by the more affluent hotel across the way—contains a packed function room, armed guards, cameras, and television lights. Margaret’s own hotel offers a room and a brief glimpse of architectural splendor; across the street, the investigation is being staged before the world’s press.

A Return to Solitude

Later, after a painful argument with Li, the taxi brings Margaret back to the hotel. A bellboy in a red uniform steps from beneath the canopy with a black umbrella to open her door. Turning back toward Li, she tells him, “I wish I’d never come back.” The words make the hotel entrance a threshold between the intimacy she had hoped to recover and the distance that has opened between them.

Margaret then passes through the revolving doors alone and takes the lift to her sixth-floor room. There, on a large, cold, empty bed, she cries herself to sleep. The scene reverses the promise suggested by the hotel’s grandeur: its historical prestige and richly appointed interiors cannot soften the emotional isolation of her return. The building’s significance is therefore both public and personal—a monument to Shanghai’s cosmopolitan past, and the setting for Margaret’s immediate sense of loss.