Astor House: A Hundred Years In A Year

A little more than a year ago I started this project of reviewing my collection of postcards, photos and random captured finds of material that is connected with the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai.

A drawing of the Astor House from just before it reopened in 1911

The collection had grown to several hundred items in a couple of mostly unsorted folders on my harddisk, without a plan or really any purpose other than a vague hoarder's instinct.

In this one year, I wrote 25 blog posts, each dealing with a few photos or artefacts at a time. It quite naturally turned into a walk around the hotel, with brief stops inside and further afield, but never more than a few hundred meters away from the hotel.

In roughly 15,000 words I described the building, my association with the place, the history of the many businesses around the hotel and short biographies of some of the people we encountered along the way.

Researching each of the blog posts often surfaced new material online that I then tried to retrofit into some of the previous articles. This also gave me even more future directions for new blog posts.

When I now look back at this list, it is dawning on me that I replaced a simple hobby - collecting random historical photos of the Astor House - with the much more complex activity of writing an open-ended series of essays about the history of Shanghai and the lives of the people who called it home during some of the most turbulent times every experienced by a single city.

And to make it completely clear - I'm not a historian or academically trained to compile the history of one of the key cities of China's colonial time. Whatever I do here will be incomplete and lacking in depth as a true historical record.

But what I can do is to provide a view into one little corner of Shanghai with the perspective of somebody that has seen the very tail end of one of the many chapters of the Astor House.

Writing these articles has changed how I see Shanghai and its history. I had mostly expected it to be short descriptions of each postcard or artefact. But what I found in my research for these articles are the many names of people whose life stories are woven into the fabric of this place.

Sailors on shore leave, refugees from the Russian Revolution, uncountable souls fleeing Nazi Germany, trading families from the Middle East, Sikhs in the employ of the British, business owners, sales people, entertainers on world tours, teachers, spies and soldiers of many countries and of course the many, many Chinese that called this place home.

This research has given me a much deeper understanding of what kind of a place colonial Shanghai must have been - a free port split between global super powers, frequently fought over by armies, bursting at the seams with refugees. A place with nearly unlimited commercial potential, where the rich stepped over the bodies of the destitute. Where hard-working laborers and tradespeople could eke out an existence in basements and on boats, while the tallest and most modern buildings in Asia were erected all around them.

Over the 25 essays I've posted roughly a hundred photos, postcards or artefact scans. That is approximately a third of the media that I have amassed over the years. And while not all of the photos warrant an article or even a brief mention, I'm pretty sure I still have interesting material for at least another dozen essays.

I'm looking forward to learning more about this little corner of Shanghai and sharing it with you!