Istayed in my first historic Asian hotel on my first visit to the region in the late 1950s. It was Frank Lloyd Wright’s famous Imperial Hotel in Tokyo and I still remember the sense of severe disillusionment I felt when I entered the lobby late on a summer afternoon after an endless flight across the Pacific aboard one of Pan American’s China Clippers.
Exactly what I was expecting I can’t say; probably something that would immediately confirm that I was in Japan rather than Los Angeles or Honolulu. What I found instead was a low, oddly uninviting structure, built of reddish lava stone, suggesting the dark claustrophobia of a Mayan temple rather than the light, airy quality I perceived as distinctively Japanese. It certainly had an interesting history as one of the very few buildings in Tokyo to survive the catastrophic earthquake of 1923 and the fire bombing of World War II.
As I wandered through its long, dimly-lit corridors and tried to shave with the use of a mirror set about four feet from the bathroom floor, I summoned up little sense of the romance of staying in one of the world’s most legendary hotels. Perhaps other guests were similarly affected or the owners simply decided it was too “old-fashioned” for the modern image Tokyo was bent on swiftly acquiring.
To Somerset Maugham, Singapore’s Raffles Hotel stood for “all the fables of the exotic east.” Starting as a simple bungalow on Beach Road in 1887, it grew into one of the most famous hotels in Asia, as shown in this picture taken in the 1930s when it was a gathering place for locals and international travelers.
The buildings that make up the Amangalla date back several hundred years. The hotel is situated within the walls of Galle Fort, recently declared a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
The extensively renovated interior of the Amangalla once played host to Dutch and British soldiers.
In any event, the old Imperial disappeared a year or so later, with only a few voices raised in protest and was replaced by an ultra-modern creation where you really could be just about anywhere on Earth.
This was happening in other places too, as I discovered on subsequent travels. The great mass tourist boom was then just getting underway in Asia and as it gathered momentum whole cities were being transformed, not just their physical appearance but also in some cases their very personalities. Soon it was getting harder and harder to tell where you were from a superficial view and even more if you were staying in one of the countless hotels that had materialized along with everything else.
But my own perceptions and priorities were changing as well. Increasingly, I found myself trying to discover ways to get behind these bland contemporary façades that concealed the real cities; and as often as not the solution proved to be no more difficult than finding and booking a room in a hotel rich in local history. I was surprised at the number that were still in business, some precariously clinging to life amid all the unimaginative new construction, others lovingly restored by owners sensitive to their importance; and for me, they proved to be rare havens where the distinctive flavor of the past could be recaptured. On later visits to Tokyo, I even felt a powerful nostalgia about Wright’s Imperial and wished that some way could have been found to preserve its gloomy glory, which in retrospect, didn’t seem so anachronistic after all.
During a certain period, almost every major Asian city had at least one hotel that seemed to encapsulate its essence to visitors from afar and sometimes they had several. The names of these places spread through old travel guides, through the colorful luggage stickers that adorned steamer trunks, sometimes simply by word of mouth, from one knowledgeable traveler to another.
I am talking here, of course, about another, long-ago age of travel, when people went mostly by ship or train and took their time about it, staying for weeks or months in one place along the way. Arriving at such exotic destinations as Bombay (known today, alas, as Mumbai), Rangoon (Yangon), Singapore or Bangkok, they wanted comfort, even luxury, a home away from home. Uniformed representatives met them on arrival and conveyed them and their often copious luggage to the hotel in question, which was nearly always only a short distance away from the port or railway station.
When a ballroom was added in 1920, the Raffles Hotel became a permanent fixture on Singapore’s burgeoning social scene. Ballroom dances were regularly held until the outbreak of World War II.
Nearly all of these establishments were built toward the end of the 19th century, or in the early 20th, and most reflected pseudo-classical styles that had emerged in British India. They had vast lobbies (in which the newcomer was more than likely to run into a wandering friend or two), restaurants that served familiar food along with a few more
