The Astor House Hotel – Tientsin

The first of two Tientsin hotel ads from the 1920s today. The Astor House still stands and is still a hotel and is still opposite Victoria Park. The Park, the hotel and the nearby former Gordon Hall all look OK – though further along there’s an awful Japanese built modern hotel that suits the surrounding architecture like a fox in a henhouse sadly. When I last stayed at the Astor, which is still quite charmingly shambolic, they showed me a hundred year old lightbulb that still worked (though they didn’t light it up) and we had dinner in the Tudor Room – nice room, steak fried to within an inch of charcoal. There is also a nice old style former lift but health and safety won’t let you use it (why is it that the one thing that are truly global are the numskulls of H&S?). They also had a German manager, which of course, many hotels in China still think is a good idea. Anyway, this ad ran in 1925.