Shanghai Hotel — A Piece of Time Preserved from Shenzhen’s Youth

Shanghai Hotel has never been just an ordinary old hotel to me.

Publicly available records show that it was begun in 1983 and opened in 1985, with Shenzhen CATIC, parties in Hong Kong, and Shanghai Petrochemical’s Jinshan Hotel among those involved in its development. Shenzhen was still a very young city then, finding its way in many areas. The name “Shanghai Hotel” was more than a label. It also signalled the arrival in Shenzhen of Shanghai’s more established hotel experience and distinctly Shanghainese style.

Shenzhen developed rapidly in those early years. “Time is money” was not merely a slogan; it gradually became a way of life. At a time when many people elsewhere in mainland China were still unaccustomed to speaking openly about money, Shenzhen was already drawing young people from across the country with higher wages and greater opportunities. Efficiency, speed, competition and making money became some of the city’s most visible traits. Shenzhen was once called a “cultural desert” and later often seemed overly commercial. Shanghai Hotel felt different. It did not make a show of luxury, but retained a refined, restrained and measured Shanghainese character. Even today, old photographs of the Shanghai Bund remain part of the hotel’s décor, continuing that style.

My memories of Shanghai Hotel are also tied to Shenzhen’s former urban boundary. In the early 1990s, fields and dirt slopes could still be seen to the west of the hotel. To the east were Shangbu and Huaqiangbei, where the electronics street was already bustling. Shanghai Hotel stood between the two: on one side, land that had not yet been fully developed; on the other, the noise and activity of the city.

I was not yet thirty when I first arrived in Shenzhen and was still in my young adulthood. The electronics and technology market upstairs from McDonald’s and Huakang Building on Zhenxing Road were places where I once worked, traded and competed in business. Listening at night to Xiaoyu’s radio programme Starry Night Flight is another small memory from those Shenzhen years.

That period could be called Shenzhen’s adolescence. Construction sites, opportunities and uncertainty were everywhere. People believed that life still lay ahead and that tomorrow would bring many new things. Shenzhen’s adolescence happened to coincide with my own young adulthood. I worked and lived in the city, watched it spread outwards day by day, and passed through an important period of my own life there.

Later, the fields and dirt slopes disappeared, high-rises went up one after another, and many familiar roads and buildings were demolished or rebuilt. “People and affairs pass through their changes; from their coming and going, past and present are formed.” Cities are always changing, but Shenzhen changed with exceptional speed. After only a few years away, familiar places could become almost unrecognisable.

Today, Shanghai Hotel is surrounded by high-rises, yet it was not casually demolished and rebuilt. It no longer attracts attention through its height. Instead, its steadiness and sense of balance have gradually acquired a dignity deposited by time.

In 2005, Shanghai Hotel was selected, through a public vote involving Shenzhen residents, as one of the “Ten Historic Buildings of Shenzhen’s Reform and Opening-Up”. It was later entered on Shenzhen’s register of historic buildings. Its survival reflects more than the building itself. Many people who lived through Shenzhen’s early years still remember it.

I do not value Shanghai Hotel simply because age makes something worth remembering. Many things are old, and not all of them need to be preserved. Only those that have passed through time, endured wind and weather, and remain in use begin to acquire a weight of their own.

Human life has an appropriate scale. A meal is not necessarily better because it is more expensive, nor because it is cheaper. A home is not always more comfortable because it is larger and emptier. A hotel likewise need not be the tallest, newest or most luxurious. Often it is the right measure that gives people a sense of ease. That is what Shanghai Hotel gives me. It is unshowy and has not remade itself entirely through successive waves of urban renewal. Instead, it has gradually settled into a stable state.

That kind of stability is uncommon in a city marked by constant demolition, construction and renewal. Shanghai Hotel has not been sealed off as a monument; it continues to operate. People can still stay there, eat there, and look at the old photographs in its lobby. What it preserves is not a past that has ended, but a piece of history that can still be entered.

“Year after year the flowers seem the same; year after year, the people are different.” When I walk into Shanghai Hotel now, I think not only of an old building, but also of the electronics and technology market above McDonald’s, Huakang Building on Zhenxing Road, and Starry Night Flight on the radio at night. I remember the person I was before I turned thirty.

The city has grown up, and I am no longer young. Shanghai Hotel is still standing there, preserving a period from Shenzhen’s adolescence and some memories from my own young adulthood. As long as it remains open and people can still enter and use it, it is more than a hotel. It is a piece of history that remains alive.

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