How Hong Kong’s Repulse Bay Hotel became a haven for the famous

The Hongkong Hotel, cornering Queen’s Road Central and Pedder Street, had been a tip-top luxury resort at the turn of the 20th century, but by the start of the Roaring 20s, things were feeling gloomy and down-at-heel. It was unfashionable, unsophisticated and, as non-British guests regularly complained, unwelcoming. Its dinners were boiled to within an inch of remaining solid (proper English style), its dance floor sagged and the overall atmosphere as stuffy and strait-laced as the colonials who formed the bulk of its boiled-potato clientele.

Meanwhile, Singapore had the Raffles and its famous gin slings; Penang the E&O (or the Eat & Owe, as called by guests doing a dine-and-dash and jumping on the next liner); and Rangoon The Strand Hotel, with its impressive teak and marble floors. Outside the empire, Beijing was home to the Grand Hôtel de Pékin, its magnificent rooftop overlooking the Forbidden City. And, of course, Shanghai cast a deep shade: the Majestic on Bubbling Well Road had a sprung dance floor and large winter gardens conservatory, the well-appointed Palace Hotel was right on the Bund, and the Astor House Hotel boasted a highly rated grill room overlooking Suzhou Creek.

The new, luxurious ocean liners from Europe via Suez, or the United States west coast via Kobe, brought rich tourists aplenty before the Great Depression hit. They marvelled at old Beijing, danced the night away in Shanghai, but were left a little flat by Hong Kong, where the nightlife was drab, the shopping dreary and the hotels dated.

The shame challenge was taken up by the Kadoorie family, whose Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels also owned Shanghai’s Palace, Astor House and the Majestic, as well as the prestigious Grand Hôtel des Wagons-Lits, in Beijing’s Legation Quarter. Realising that Hong Kong could offer something that Shanghai, Peking, Rangoon and Singapore didn’t have – beautiful calm bays with magical sunsets and warm sea all year round, they dubbed Hong Kong Island’s south coast the Riviera of the Far East, and to crown it they built the Repulse Bay Hotel, with Hong Kong’s governor, Reginald Stubbs, cutting the ribbon on New Year’s Day 1920.

The concept and the edifice fundamentally altered the character of the south side of Hong Kong Island. Back in 1911, Geoffrey Robley Sayer, a colonial civil servant and historian, had described the coast as “remote and unravished” visited only by “occasional weekend picnickers”. While the south coast was gradually becoming home to new villas, from Deep Water Bay to Repulse Bay and on to Stanley, the shoreline and beaches remained largely secluded.

The opening of the Repulse Bay Hotel spurred traffic out from Victoria City (now Central) and encouraged yet more villa building. The Shanghai novelist Eileen Chang (Zhang Ailing) was a regular visitor during her University of Hong Kong days, and in her 1943 novella, Love in a Fallen City, protagonist Bai Liusu, a Shanghai divorcee, accompanies the man she loves, Fan Liuyuan, to the south coast: “After disembarking they took a taxi to the Repulse Bay Hotel. They left the teeming city behind, the taxi rising and dipping across the hilly terrain. Soon cliffs of yellow-and-red soil flanked the road, while ravines opened up on either side to reveal dense green forest or aquamarine sea. As they approached Repulse Bay, the cliffs and trees grew gentler and more inviting. Returning picnickers swept past them in cars filled with flowers, the sound of scattered laughter fading in the wind.”

Baltimore native Wallis Spencer arrived at the Repulse Bay Hotel in late September 1924, the wife of a naval commander, Win Spencer, who was stationed in Hong Kong with the US Navy’s South China Patrol. Later, Wallis Spencer would move to London, become Wallis Simpson, and catch the eye of the Prince of Wales. He would soon become King Edward VIII, before sensationally abdicating the throne to marry Wallis, making her the Duchess of Windsor and the most talked about woman in the world for half a century. But all that was years ahead. In 1924, Wallis was 28, and had just sailed for six weeks from the US to try and repair a troubled marriage with Win, one of America’s first “Top Gun” pilots but who also drank, which did nothing to temper his aggressive nature.

Repulse Bay was nonetheless a beautiful introduction to Hong Kong. Later, Wallis would endure far more utilitarian and cramped navy quarters in Tsim Sha Tsui, but first a little luxury. Beds of fragrant flowers lined the footpaths that twisted throughout the hotel’s secluded grounds. There was nothing to disturb the peace at night but a few fishermen’s lanterns out at sea and the sweep of the occasional car headlights on the road. Guests were welcomed personally by the American manager, James Harper Taggart, a veteran employee of Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, who’d run its Hongkong Hotel for years.

Wallis and Win reacquainted themselves after a year apart, and Repulse Bay served well as a romantic setting. The rambling establishment was built in what was termed British colonial style – relaxed, genteel and with an abundance of indoor greenery to cool and refresh the space. None of the hotel buildings were more than a couple of storeys tall. The suites had balconies with vine-clad trellises and red-striped awnings. Those overlooking the bay caught the sun during the day. Just offshore could be seen the pleasure boats that circumnavigated Hong Kong Island, sometimes stopping at Repulse Bay, where even in September the sea was warm enough for a swim. All in all, it was the perfect spot for a couple to try and restart their stalled marriage. Win swore he was off the booze for good.

The Repulse Bay Hotel’s tiffin, which always included a curry as a tribute to the Kadoorie family’s time in Bombay, was an instant Hong Kong institution: silver cutlery on starched tablecloths, sterling platters laden with curried prawns, baked halibut, boiled mutton, cold capons and tongue, lamb chops, asparagus omelette, macaroni and cheese, and devilled turkey. Those with any room left were offered Moka ice cream, Napolitaine jelly and cream, beignets soufflé (deep-fried jam-filled choux puffs) and, of course, an excellent wine cellar (pots of fresh-brewed Folgers coffee for Win).

In the 1930s, the hotel became a spot for celebrities passing through town. Robert Hotung took a visiting George Bernard Shaw there in 1933. Noël Coward stopped by, and the tiffin was perennially popular, with The New Yorker correspondent Emily Hahn dining there regularly in the late 30s. She was in Hong Kong from her usual base of Shanghai while researching her biography of the Soong Sisters, and always found time for a drink. “A gimlet is made of gin and bottled lime juice. It is the tipple of Hong Kong, as a gin sling is of Singapore”, she later commented, reminiscing about the sundowners on the terrace overlooking the bay.

Hahn was followed down by many Chinese intellectuals fleeing the Japanese attack, including the editorial staff of T’ien Hsia – the left-leaning Shanghai-based monthly magazine that published such luminaries as Shao Xunmei (Hahn’s first husband), Lin Yutang, William Empson and, of course, Hahn herself. The editors based themselves at the hotel for a time, sitting around in the rattan chairs, drinking tea and laying out new issues on the bamboo tables before they finally secured offices in the HSBC Building in Central.

Newly married couple Martha Gellhorn and Ernest Hemingway, in Hong Kong en route to Chongqing to report on China’s resistance to the Japanese, came for tiffin in early 1941. They looked out across the bay and decided the peace and quiet was what they needed. They moved from their room at the Hongkong Hotel, also worried about a deadly outbreak of typhoid in the colony’s more densely packed districts.

As peaceful as the bay was, the signs were ominous. Fearing a Japanese attack, the British army had rolled out barbed wire on the beach and built pillboxes at either end of the bay. The war drums were beating loudly. Gellhorn appreciated the fresher air. The couple got some exercise hiking to “sampan city” over at Aberdeen. Hemingway, so Gellhorn wrote, “took to Hong Kong at once”, and (unsurprisingly) liked the hotel’s gin cocktails. He remained fairly well-behaved during his stay, necking gimlets and smoking cigars with Hahn on the veranda overlooking the bay. Gellhorn thought the Repulse Bay Hotel charming, “set in lovely gardens and done up in chintz”, which she interpreted as a very English style. “Soft-footed servants bore pink gins [gin and a dash of Angostura bitters] around the place constantly.”

Repulse Bay had a bad war. The 8th Coast Regiment defended the hotel until December 23, 1941. Later that day, overwhelmed by Japanese forces, 53 British and Canadian soldiers were executed nearby. After Christmas Day, allied citizens – mostly wives, children and the elderly – were initially interned at the hotel. They were transported to Repulse Bay on open-back trucks, one suitcase per family. The beach was still covered in coils of barbed wire and soldiers had started to dig a trench across the hotel’s lawn. Sandbags were piled up outside the ground-floor suites. The internees were told to stay away from the windows – bored Japanese snipers had been known to take potshots. A drainage tunnel under the hotel was converted into a hasty bomb shelter – a very humid, mouldy, slimy shelter. The newly appointed governor of Japanese-occupied Hong Kong, Rensuke Isogai, commandeered a European-style villa in Repulse Bay as his accommodation, claiming he wanted to be close to the sea, meaning the area swarmed with his menacing bodyguards.

After 1945, the hotel was refurbished and opened again for business. The historian Philip Snow claimed that, though the staff and management tried, the Repulse Bay Hotel was “never quite the same again”. In 1963, the first high-rise tower was constructed in Repulse Bay and gradually the verdant slopes down to the beach disappeared under concrete. In her elegiac 1988 lament Hong Kong: Epilogue to an Empire, travel writer Jan Morris wrote: “It was a dear old place. Its famous teas, its wicker chairs, its veranda above the beach – all these were the very epitome of British colonial life”. Morris was only partially right – the teas, the chairs and the verandas were all charming, but the hotel was always more cosmopolitan than simply a vestige of colonial life. The seaplanes landing on the bay bringing honeymooners from Kuala Lumpur, Singapore, the Dutch East Indies, Manila and China, testified to the hotel’s far-flung appeal.

But, for some, the Repulse Bay Hotel was only a temporary balm. Gellhorn soon realised that Hemingway was not one for constancy or domesticity and the couple divorced in 1945. The frisson of war that had brought them together departed, and so did their relationship. Hahn scandalously fell in love with the married head of British intelligence in Hong Kong, Charles Boxer. She struggled through the deprivations of the occupation to try and support him in prison. In Chang’s Love in a Fallen City, Bai Liusu and Fan Liuyuan are at their happiest in their suite at the Repulse Bay Hotel – “The whole room seemed to be a dark picture frame around the big ocean painting there. Roaring breakers spilled onto the curtains, staining their edges blue”. But eventually they must return to Shanghai and once there become trapped in the occupied metropolis. Chang returned to Shanghai, too. Her own marriage fell apart, she moved to the US, wrote some of China’s best modern fiction, but was perhaps never fulfilled in love.

After their second honeymoon, Win found life hard in Hong Kong and started drinking again. He became abusive and violent towards Wallis, she decided to leave him, fled to Shanghai, and from there to Beijing. She spent a year in China, rediscovering herself, mixing in sophisticated cosmopolitan circles, developing a love for Chinese objets and especially jade – the style that would become her fashion leitmotif for the rest of her life. She called the period her “Lotus Year” referring to Homer’s Lotus Eaters, those living in a state of dreamy forgetfulness, never to return home. But Wallis did eventually, when she divorced Win, restart her life, and the rest is history.

She, like so many other guests, never forgot the Repulse Bay Hotel and wrote in her memoirs of those sundowners by the bay, and the “beautiful vision” of Hong Kong.

Paul French’s book exploring the future Duchess of Windsor’s mysterious year in Hong Kong, Shanghai and Beijing, Her Lotus Year: China, the Roaring Twenties and the Making of Wallis Simpson (St Martin’s Press), is out this month and available at all good bookshops, online and as an audiobook.