Last Chance to See

by Douglas Adams

We flew to Shanghai the next day and began to think about the dolphins toward which we were slowly edging our way across China. We went to think about them in the bar of the Peace Hotel. This turned out not to be a good place to think because you couldn’t hear yourself doing it, but we wanted to see the place anyway. The Peace Hotel is a spectacular remnant of the days when Shanghai was one of the most glamorous and cosmopolitan ports in the world. In the Thirties the hotel was known as the Cathay, and was the most sumptuous place in town. This was where people came to glitter at one another. In one of its suites Noël Coward wrote a draft of Private Lives. Now the paint is peeling, the lobby is dark and draughty, the posters advertising the World Famous Peace Hotel Jazz Band are written in felt tip and Scotch-taped onto the paneling, but the ghost of the Cathay’s former grandeur still lurks high up among the dusty chandeliers, wondering what’s been going on for the last forty years.