Letter from Shanghai: Standing in the Ireland Room of the Peace Hotel, an art deco palace formerly known as the Cathay Hotel, you can look out over the turrets and spires of the still elegant Bund promenade, and conjure up dreams of a China long dead, writes Clifford Coonan
Across the Huangpo River, the skyscrapers of Pudong point to China's future, but the narrow Tudor-panelled stairwells, the intricate chandeliers and white marble floors of the Peace Hotel are a piece of old Europe in new China.
Located at 19A on the Bund, the Chicago-style Cathay Hotel was built by Sir Victor Sassoon, a British Sephardic Jew who made his money selling opium and guns, and who famously said: "There is only one race better than the Jews and that's the derby."
Sassoon was one of the richest men in Shanghai, and owned over 1,900 buildings by the time of the revolution in 1949. He opened the Cathay, which was also known as Sassoon House, in 1929 in the middle of the Jazz Age.
Shanghai's bawdy wealth was then the envy of a world reeling from the Great Depression. In Shanghai, the champagne sold by the case.
Located on the corner of busy Nanjing Road and the Bund, the hotel is an enduring monument to the unbridled capitalism and cosmopolitan chic of the privileged few of the 1920s and 1930s.
Like Raffles in Singapore or the Shelbourne in Dublin, the Cathay was one of those hotels inseparable from the city where it was situated.
Travellers from all over the world were drawn to what was the most luxurious hotel in the world when it opened, with its copper-green, pyramid-shaped top, smooth revolving doors, copper chandeliers in the art deco style and Italian marble floors.
The granite tower rises 12 storeys to culminate in a copper roof, below which was tucked Mr Sassoon's private balcony high above the city.
The Ireland Room is fairly anonymous, it has to be said, and contains a TV for karaoke singing nowadays. However, it is situated very near where the Tower Nightclub used to be. The fashionable private parties Sassoon held on the top floor were legendary in Shanghai's demi-monde.
Noel Coward finished off his play Private Lives in the penthouse suite in 1930 while fighting off a bout of the flu.
Celebrities as diverse as George Bernard Shaw, Charlie Chaplin and Chiang Kai-shek stayed here.
All through the hotel there are remnants of the pre-communist era. The clocks in the lobby tell the time in New York, Moscow, Tokyo and, strangely, Hawaii.
The elevator to the bottom floor goes to G rather than 1, which is where the ground floor is in China. Post-communist China, that is.
"This is British style, to stop on the ground floor. We've had to change the lift to stop it stopping at 1. Chinese people get confused," says Ma Yongzhang, the hotel's PR man.
The National Deluxe Suites are a small wonder of preservation, a snapshot of 1930s lifestyle.
They include Chinese, British, American, French, Japanese, Italian, German, Indian and Spanish rooms, all elegantly decorated and carefully preserved in original 1930s style.
The city's foreign residents, who became known as Shanghailanders, were made up of thousands of refugees - White Russians fleeing the Bolsheviks, Jews fleeing Hitler, but also young Irish, British and American men looking for adventure.
And it wasn't all pink fizz and party till you die. Expatriate business people with their families also came, such as J.G. Ballard's father, who managed a factory in Shanghai. It was from the Cathay Hotel that the young Ballard watches the Japanese take the city.
Some of the jazz men in the bar, which used to be called the Horse and Hound, can remember playing the jitterbug at a time when British, Americans, French, Germans and Japanese ran the city.
The band still plays the old-time jazz favoured during the era - their average age is 75 - just as they did for the Shanghailanders, and, in later years, for Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.
The Cathay Hotel was closed in 1950 after the communist revolution, and reopened in 1956 as the Peace Hotel.
These days the Peace Hotel is divided into two parts - the 12-storey north building, which was the Cathay, and the south building, which was formerly the Palace Hotel.
Of course, the Peace Hotel has the usual five-star facilities such as a gymnasium, business centre and beauty salon. And yet the hotel retains a certain atmosphere, something apart from the blandness which characterises so many modern luxury hotels.
The rooms are comfortable but dark in a way you would never expect of a top class hotel today, and of a smaller scale than a five-star hotel in the west. It has a dated feel. Almost haunted.