Beijing Hotel

Beijing Hotel stands at 33 East Chang'an Avenue, a few hundred metres east of Tiananmen Square and at the southern end of Wangfujing, the city's main shopping street. It is the oldest hotel in Beijing, founded in 1900, and for most of the twentieth century it was the hotel of the state: the place where foreign delegations were lodged, where the new republic held its first banquet and where the leadership entertained. The state owns it to this day, and it operates as a luxury hotel in Beijing with about 600 rooms in several connected buildings.

History

The hotel began in 1900 as a small establishment run by French proprietors near the Legation Quarter, and moved to its present site on Chang'an Avenue in 1903. Between 1915 and 1917 a seven-storey building in the French style went up, the Grand Hotel de Pekin, designed and built by the French firm Brossard-Mopin, with a ballroom and a roof terrace that made it the most fashionable address in the capital through the 1920s and 1930s.

On the evening of 1 October 1949, after Mao Zedong proclaimed the People's Republic of China from the Tiananmen gate, the new government held its first state banquet in the hotel. From then on Beijing Hotel served as the official guest house of the state. A new east wing opened in 1954, and a 17-storey west wing in 1974 to accommodate the visitors who followed the opening to the West. The historic 1917 building was restored and operated from 2006 by Raffles as Raffles Beijing Hotel, before returning to the Beijing Hotel group's own management. The neighbouring Grand Hotel Beijing, opened in 1990, belongs to the same complex.

Architecture and design

The complex reads along Chang'an Avenue as a sequence of its own history. The 1917 building keeps its French facade of grey stone and its tall windows, with the original ballroom and its chandeliers inside. The 1954 east wing follows the socialist classicism of the decade, and the 1974 west wing is a modernist block of the kind built for the first wave of foreign visitors, with large banqueting floors. The interiors of the older buildings use marble, carved wood and carpets in the Chinese palace manner, and the main lobby is lined with paintings of Chinese landscapes.

Rooms and suites

The hotel has around 600 rooms and suites across its buildings. Rooms in the historic wing have high ceilings and the original proportions; those in the newer wings face either Chang'an Avenue, with views towards Tiananmen, or the courtyards and Wangfujing behind. The suites in the historic building are the ones used for visiting dignitaries.

Dining

The hotel's Chinese restaurants are its strength, serving Beijing cuisine including Peking duck, as well as Cantonese and Huaiyang dishes, in dining rooms that have hosted official banquets for seventy years. The historic building's ballroom and lobby bar keep their 1920s character, and Western dining is available in the newer wings.

Wellness

The hotel has an indoor swimming pool and a fitness centre, and spa treatments are offered in the newer wings.

Weddings and events

Beijing Hotel has been a venue of state since 1949 and its banqueting floors are built for scale: a grand ballroom that seats many hundreds at round tables, the historic 1917 ballroom for formal dinners, and a large number of meeting rooms used by ministries, state companies and conferences. Weddings are held in the ballrooms, and the hotel's address next to Tiananmen Square gives wedding photographs a backdrop no other hotel in the city can offer.

Location

The hotel sits at the corner of Chang'an Avenue and Wangfujing, a ten-minute walk from Tiananmen Square and the entrance to the Forbidden City, and next to Wangfujing station on Line 1 of the Beijing Subway. The National Museum of China and the Great Hall of the People are at the square. Allow about 45 minutes by car to Beijing Capital International Airport and about an hour to Beijing Daxing. For a luxury hotel in Beijing at the political and historical centre of the capital, no other address comes closer.