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140-726: The Astor House Hotel , known as the Pujiang Hotel (浦江饭店) in Chinese from 1959–2018, was described as once "one of the famous hotels of the world". Established in 1846 as Richards' Hotel and Restaurant (礼查饭店) on The Bund in Shanghai , it was located at 15 Huangpu Lu, Shanghai, near the confluence of the Huangpu River and the Suzhou Creek in the Hongkou District , near the northern end of

280-464: A nucleus that has a vowel (which can be a monophthong , diphthong , or even a triphthong in certain varieties), preceded by an onset (a single consonant , or consonant + glide ; a zero onset is also possible), and followed (optionally) by a coda consonant; a syllable also carries a tone . There are some instances where a vowel is not used as a nucleus. An example of this is in Cantonese, where

420-457: A subject–verb–object word order , and like many other languages of East Asia, makes frequent use of the topic–comment construction to form sentences. Chinese also has an extensive system of classifiers and measure words , another trait shared with neighboring languages such as Japanese and Korean. Other notable grammatical features common to all the spoken varieties of Chinese include the use of serial verb construction , pronoun dropping , and

560-580: A winter garden . Mary Hall, who stayed at the Astor House in April 1914, described her experience: The Astor House, which since I was here last, seventeen years ago, had outgrown all recognition....I entered the spacious social hall flanked with cigar, sweets, scent and other stalls....[I]nside the hotel it was easy to imagine ones self in London or New York. The idea is soon dissipated when you find yourself following

700-599: A "serious crisis" confronted the shareholders of the Astor House Hotel Company. While praise for the renovations was almost universal, they strained severely the Hotel's finances. The Hotel's bank refused to issue the funds needed to pay interest to the debenture holders, forcing an extraordinary meeting with the trustees of the note holders. The interest was finally paid after mortgaging the Astor Garden (B.C. Lot 1744),

840-505: A Chinese character is the morpheme, as characters represent the smallest grammatical units with individual meanings in the Chinese language. Estimates of the total number of Chinese words and lexicalized phrases vary greatly. The Hanyu Da Zidian , a compendium of Chinese characters, includes 54,678 head entries for characters, including oracle bone versions. The Zhonghua Zihai (1994) contains 85,568 head entries for character definitions and

980-561: A Russian guest's wallet with its contents, spent a third of it on a car. That car became Shanghai's first taxi, and spawned the Johnson fleet, now known as the Qiangsheng taxi", which is "now ranked number-two by the number of taxis in the city behind Dazhong. The Shanghai government took over Qiangsheng after the Communists won the Chinese civil war in 1949". Despite an annual profit of $ 596,437 in

1120-595: A Shanghai resident may speak both Standard Chinese and Shanghainese ; if they grew up elsewhere, they are also likely fluent in the dialect of their home region. In addition to Standard Chinese, a majority of Taiwanese people also speak Taiwanese Hokkien (also called 台語 ; 'Taiwanese' ), Hakka , or an Austronesian language . A speaker in Taiwan may mix pronunciations and vocabulary from Standard Chinese and other languages of Taiwan in everyday speech. In part due to traditional cultural ties with Guangdong , Cantonese

1260-403: A bathroom adjoining, all of which look outward, facing either the city or the Huangpu River . Easy access is gained to the various floors upon which they are situated by electric elevators . The hotel...generates its own electricity and has its own refrigerating plant." Architects and civil engineers Davies & Thomas (established in 1896 by Gilbert Davies and C.W, Thomas), were responsible for

1400-462: A central variety (i.e. prestige variety, such as Standard Mandarin), as the issue requires some careful handling when mutual intelligibility is inconsistent with language identity. The Chinese government's official Chinese designation for the major branches of Chinese is 方言 ; fāngyán ; 'regional speech', whereas the more closely related varieties within these are called 地点方言 ; 地點方言 ; dìdiǎn fāngyán ; 'local speech'. Because of

1540-408: A city is largely given by the buildings that first catch the eye. The new Astor House Extension will greatly assist in bearing in upon the visitor that he is approaching no mean city. Favoured by its site, it stands out boldly and inspires a belief in the future of a city that can support such a huge caravanserai, in addition to others. The Shanghai resident regards it with equal admiration and also with

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1680-496: A completely new hotel, "fitting of Shanghai's growth and importance" and "better than any in the Far East." In 1908, before any reconstruction or renovations, the Astor House was described in glowing terms: Leading straight from the entrance to the main residential portion of the house is a long glass arcade . Upon one side of this are the offices, where the clerks and commissioners will attend promptly and courteously to every want; upon

1820-597: A compromise between the pronunciations of different regions. The royal courts of the Ming and early Qing dynasties operated using a koiné language known as Guanhua , based on the Nanjing dialect of Mandarin. Standard Chinese is an official language of both the People's Republic of China and the Republic of China (Taiwan), one of the four official languages of Singapore , and one of

1960-700: A corresponding increase in the number of homophones . As an example, the small Langenscheidt Pocket Chinese Dictionary lists six words that are commonly pronounced as shí in Standard Chinese: In modern spoken Mandarin, however, tremendous ambiguity would result if all of these words could be used as-is. The 20th century Yuen Ren Chao poem Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den exploits this, consisting of 92 characters all pronounced shi . As such, most of these words have been replaced in speech, if not in writing, with less ambiguous disyllabic compounds. Only

2100-640: A general store, a ship chandler , and a commissioned agent business on 4th Avenue (四马路) (now Fuzhou Road; 福州路). In 1846, Richards opened one of the first Western restaurants in Shanghai and the first Western hotel in China. These were located south of the Yangkingpang (Yangjingbang) creek. The hotel was "a single and ordinary building" built in the Baroque style , which initially targeted the seafaring clientele that made up

2240-601: A gradual replacement of the system in favor of the SI metric system. The Weights and Measures Ordinance defines the metric, Imperial, and Chinese units. As of 2012, all three systems are legal for trade and are in widespread use. The standard commercial measure of real estate area is in square feet of the Imperial system. Apartment or office size is generally still given in square feet. However, square metres are used for official purposes. The traditional units of agricultural land area are

2380-695: A lot that was slightly larger than 22 mu (15,000 m (160,000 sq ft)) in a section of reclaimed mud flats in Hongkew east of Broadway (now Daming Lu) on the northern banks of the Soochow Creek , that was adjacent to the new bridge, and faced the Suzhou Creek near its confluence with the Huangpu River, "at a huge profit for the building of the Astor House Hotel." In February 1858 Richards' store and

2520-448: A man clad in bath-room slippers and shirt to the feet, the whiteness of which is relieved by a long black pigtail hanging down his back. He bows and smiles as he unlocks a door and shows you to your room, which is light and airy, with a bath-room attached. The dining-room was a gorgeous scene in the evening...The room is long, and the prevailing colours buff and white: down the centre are very handsome Chinese inlaid pillars on which, during

2660-564: A millennium. The Four Commanderies of Han were established in northern Korea in the 1st century BCE but disintegrated in the following centuries. Chinese Buddhism spread over East Asia between the 2nd and 5th centuries CE, and with it the study of scriptures and literature in Literary Chinese. Later, strong central governments modeled on Chinese institutions were established in Korea, Japan, and Vietnam, with Literary Chinese serving as

2800-536: A polished teakwood bar, and a large billiard room. Farther up the grand staircase is the main dining hall, almost the whole length of the building with a gallery and verandah on the second floor and well lighted by a barreled ceiling of glass. On the Astor Road side is a handsome banqueting hall and reception rooms, both decorated in ivory and gold, and six private dining rooms. There were six service elevators, bedrooms with private sitting rooms, and luxury suites under

2940-538: A secure reconstruction of Proto-Sino-Tibetan, the higher-level structure of the family remains unclear. A top-level branching into Chinese and Tibeto-Burman languages is often assumed, but has not been convincingly demonstrated. The first written records appeared over 3,000 years ago during the Shang dynasty . As the language evolved over this period, the various local varieties became mutually unintelligible. In reaction, central governments have repeatedly sought to promulgate

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3080-528: A sense of personal pride. That gigantic edifice stands where, in the memory of many still living, the swamp-birds called defiantly to the struggling settlement that was finding its feet on the other side of the creek. It personifies to the resident the verification of the brightest dreams that in the old days the most daring dared to dream. A huge, but stately seal has in a sense been set upon the city's aspirations, and it stands at once as an emblem of accomplishment and an example for emulation. Advertising itself as

3220-503: A similar way to the use of Latin and Ancient Greek roots in European languages. Many new compounds, or new meanings for old phrases, were created in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to name Western concepts and artifacts. These coinages, written in shared Chinese characters, have then been borrowed freely between languages. They have even been accepted into Chinese, a language usually resistant to loanwords, because their foreign origin

3360-678: A single language. However, their lack of mutual intelligibility means they are sometimes considered to be separate languages in a family . Investigation of the historical relationships among the varieties of Chinese is ongoing. Currently, most classifications posit 7 to 13 main regional groups based on phonetic developments from Middle Chinese , of which the most spoken by far is Mandarin with 66%, or around 800 million speakers, followed by Min (75 million, e.g. Southern Min ), Wu (74 million, e.g. Shanghainese ), and Yue (68 million, e.g. Cantonese ). These branches are unintelligible to each other, and many of their subgroups are unintelligible with

3500-610: A unified standard. The earliest examples of Old Chinese are divinatory inscriptions on oracle bones dated to c.  1250 BCE , during the Late Shang . The next attested stage came from inscriptions on bronze artifacts dating to the Western Zhou period (1046–771 BCE), the Classic of Poetry and portions of the Book of Documents and I Ching . Scholars have attempted to reconstruct

3640-563: A variety of Yue from a small coastal area around Taishan, Guangdong . In parts of South China, the dialect of a major city may be only marginally intelligible to its neighbors. For example, Wuzhou and Taishan are located approximately 260 km (160 mi) and 190 km (120 mi) away from Guangzhou respectively, but the Yue variety spoken in Wuzhou is more similar to the Guangzhou dialect than

3780-589: Is 坪 ( Taiwanese Hokkien : pêⁿ, Hakka : phiàng, Mandarin : píng). The unit is derives from the Japanese tsubo , the base unit of the Japanese area. The principal unit of land measure is 甲 ( Taiwanese Hokkien : kah, Hakka : kap, Mandarin : jiǎ). The unit is derived from the obsolete Dutch morgen , which was introduced during Taiwan's Dutch era . Taiwanese mu is derived from Japanese se , i.e., equals one Japanese se or 30 ping . Officially, land area

3920-596: Is Taishanese. Wuzhou is located directly upstream from Guangzhou on the Pearl River , whereas Taishan is to Guangzhou's southwest, with the two cities separated by several river valleys. In parts of Fujian , the speech of some neighbouring counties or villages is mutually unintelligible. Local varieties of Chinese are conventionally classified into seven dialect groups, largely based on the different evolution of Middle Chinese voiced initials: Proportions of first-language speakers The classification of Li Rong , which

4060-640: Is a group of languages spoken natively by the ethnic Han Chinese majority and many minority ethnic groups in China , as well as by various communities of the Chinese diaspora . Approximately 1.35 billion people, or 17% of the global population, speak a variety of Chinese as their first language . Chinese languages form the Sinitic branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. The spoken varieties of Chinese are usually considered by native speakers to be dialects of

4200-485: Is called either 华语 ; 華語 ; Huáyǔ or 汉语 ; 漢語 ; Hànyǔ ). Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin. The governments of both China and Taiwan intend for speakers of all Chinese speech varieties to use it as a common language of communication. Therefore, it is used in government agencies, in the media, and as a language of instruction in schools. Diglossia is common among Chinese speakers. For example,

4340-595: Is often described as a 'monosyllabic' language. However, this is only partially correct. It is largely accurate when describing Old and Middle Chinese; in Classical Chinese, around 90% of words consist of a single character that corresponds one-to-one with a morpheme , the smallest unit of meaning in a language. In modern varieties, it usually remains the case that morphemes are monosyllabic—in contrast, English has many multi-syllable morphemes, both bound and free , such as 'seven', 'elephant', 'para-' and '-able'. Some of

Astor House Hotel (Shanghai) - Misplaced Pages Continue

4480-515: Is on a 4,580 square metres (49,300 sq ft) site and has a total building area of 16,563 m (178,280 sq ft) with 134 rooms and suites. It was a landmark in the Hongkou District and the centre of foreign social life before the opening of the Cathay Hotel . It occupies an entire block, and is across the road from the Russian Consulate . Previously, the consulates of Germany,

4620-445: Is only about an eighth as many as English. All varieties of spoken Chinese use tones to distinguish words. A few dialects of north China may have as few as three tones, while some dialects in south China have up to 6 or 12 tones, depending on how one counts. One exception from this is Shanghainese which has reduced the set of tones to a two-toned pitch accent system much like modern Japanese. A very common example used to illustrate

4760-668: Is specifically meant. However, when one of the above words forms part of a compound, the disambiguating syllable is generally dropped and the resulting word is still disyllabic. For example, 石 ; shí alone, and not 石头 ; 石頭 ; shítou , appears in compounds as meaning 'stone' such as 石膏 ; shígāo ; 'plaster', 石灰 ; shíhuī ; 'lime', 石窟 ; shíkū ; 'grotto', 石英 ; 'quartz', and 石油 ; shíyóu ; 'petroleum'. Although many single-syllable morphemes ( 字 ; zì ) can stand alone as individual words, they more often than not form multi-syllable compounds known as 词 ; 詞 ; cí , which more closely resembles

4900-484: Is the largest reference work based purely on character and its literary variants. The CC-CEDICT project (2010) contains 97,404 contemporary entries including idioms, technology terms, and names of political figures, businesses, and products. The 2009 version of the Webster's Digital Chinese Dictionary (WDCD), based on CC-CEDICT, contains over 84,000 entries. The most comprehensive pure linguistic Chinese-language dictionary,

5040-496: Is used as an everyday language in Hong Kong and Macau . The designation of various Chinese branches remains controversial. Some linguists and most ordinary Chinese people consider all the spoken varieties as one single language, as speakers share a common national identity and a common written form. Others instead argue that it is inappropriate to refer to major branches of Chinese such as Mandarin, Wu, and so on as "dialects" because

5180-497: Is used in education, media, formal speech, and everyday life—though Mandarin is increasingly taught in schools due to the mainland's growing influence. Historically, the Chinese language has spread to its neighbors through a variety of means. Northern Vietnam was incorporated into the Han dynasty (202 BCE – 220 CE) in 111 BCE, marking the beginning of a period of Chinese control that ran almost continuously for

5320-540: Is used in the Language Atlas of China (1987), distinguishes three further groups: Some varieties remain unclassified, including the Danzhou dialect on Hainan , Waxianghua spoken in western Hunan , and Shaozhou Tuhua spoken in northern Guangdong . Standard Chinese is the standard language of China (where it is called 普通话 ; pǔtōnghuà ) and Taiwan, and one of the four official languages of Singapore (where it

5460-428: Is very complex, with a large number of consonants and vowels, but they are probably not all distinguished in any single dialect. Most linguists now believe it represents a diasystem encompassing 6th-century northern and southern standards for reading the classics. The complex relationship between spoken and written Chinese is an example of diglossia : as spoken, Chinese varieties have evolved at different rates, while

5600-684: The Qieyun rime dictionary (601 CE), and a late period in the 10th century, reflected by rhyme tables such as the Yunjing constructed by ancient Chinese philologists as a guide to the Qieyun system. These works define phonological categories but with little hint of what sounds they represent. Linguists have identified these sounds by comparing the categories with pronunciations in modern varieties of Chinese , borrowed Chinese words in Japanese, Vietnamese, and Korean, and transcription evidence. The resulting system

5740-574: The Beiyang government promulgated a measurement law to use not only the metric system as the standard but also a set of Chinese measurement units based directly on the Qing dynasty definitions ( 營造尺庫平制 ). where mu is the basic unit of area measurement. On 16 February 1929, the Nationalist government promulgated The Weights and Measures Act to adopt the metric system as the official standard and to limit

Astor House Hotel (Shanghai) - Misplaced Pages Continue

5880-469: The Hongkou District of Shanghai. By 1859 the hotel was renamed (in English) the Astor House Hotel, while retaining the original Chinese name until 1959. The Astor House Hotel was sold to Englishman Henry W. Smith on 1   January 1861; Richards and his wife were still residents of the Astor House when their seven-year-old daughter died on 10   February 1861. According to an 1862 guidebook, at that time

6020-525: The Korean , Japanese and Vietnamese languages, and today comprise over half of their vocabularies. This massive influx led to changes in the phonological structure of the languages, contributing to the development of moraic structure in Japanese and the disruption of vowel harmony in Korean. Borrowed Chinese morphemes have been used extensively in all these languages to coin compound words for new concepts, in

6160-680: The May Fourth Movement beginning in 1919. After the fall of the Northern Song dynasty and subsequent reign of the Jurchen Jin and Mongol Yuan dynasties in northern China, a common speech (now called Old Mandarin ) developed based on the dialects of the North China Plain around the capital. The 1324 Zhongyuan Yinyun was a dictionary that codified the rhyming conventions of new sanqu verse form in this language. Together with

6300-579: The National Language Unification Commission finally settled on the Beijing dialect in 1932. The People's Republic founded in 1949 retained this standard but renamed it 普通话 ; 普通話 ; pǔtōnghuà ; 'common speech'. The national language is now used in education, the media, and formal situations in both mainland China and Taiwan. In Hong Kong and Macau , Cantonese is the dominant spoken language due to cultural influence from Guangdong immigrants and colonial-era policies, and

6440-684: The Palace Hotel at number 19 The Bund , on the corner with Nanjing Road , had a minority share holding in the Astor House Hotel. Despite some shareholder opposition, in March 1915, Captain Henry "Harry" Elrington Morton (born 12 May 1869 in Clonmel , Ireland ; died 2 October 1923 in Manila ) a "staunch Britisher" who had become a naturalised American citizen, a master mariner who had first gone to sea at age 14, formerly of

6580-512: The Royal Navy , a Royal Arch freemason , who "had been coming to Shanghai for twenty years", was appointed managing director, with responsibility for managing Central Stores' three Shanghai hotels, including the Astor House, with a salary of $ 900 a month, plus board and lodging. Morton was "a retired ship captain who ran it as a ship, the hotel had corridors painted with portholes and trompe-l'œil seascapes and rooms decorated like cabins; there

6720-769: The Waibaidu (Garden) Bridge , from 1858 on. The hotel closed on 1 January 2018, after being purchased by an undisclosed local business. It was converted to the China Securities Museum , which opened in December 2018. The Astor House Hotel has been on the North Bund of Shanghai , by the northern end of the Waibaidu Bridge (Chinese: 外白渡桥 ; pinyin: Wàibáidù Qiáo ) (the Garden Bridge in English), since 1858. The hotel

6860-639: The Waldorf Astoria of the Orient', its new 211-room building, with a 500-seat dining room. Another advertisement described the Astor House Hotel in even more glowing terms: "Largest, Best and Most Modern Hotel in the Far East. Main Dining Room Seats 500 Guests, and is Electrically Cooled. Two hundred Bedrooms with Hot and Cold Baths Attached to Each Room. Cuisine Unexcelled; Service and Attention Perfect; Lounge, Smoking and Reading Rooms; Barber and Photographer on

7000-412: The mau or mou (Cantonese for mu , a unit used throughout China) and the local dau chung ( 斗種 ). Notionally the two units are defined differently, with the dau chung being the amount of land which could be planted by one dau ( 斗 ) of rice; in practice the area of one dau chung is roughly equal to one mau . In Taiwan, the principal unit for measuring the floor space of an office or apartment

7140-473: The oracle bone inscriptions created during the Shang dynasty c.  1250 BCE . The phonetic categories of Old Chinese can be reconstructed from the rhymes of ancient poetry. During the Northern and Southern period , Middle Chinese went through several sound changes and split into several varieties following prolonged geographic and political separation. The Qieyun , a rime dictionary , recorded

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7280-591: The phonology of Old Chinese by comparing later varieties of Chinese with the rhyming practice of the Classic of Poetry and the phonetic elements found in the majority of Chinese characters. Although many of the finer details remain unclear, most scholars agree that Old Chinese differs from Middle Chinese in lacking retroflex and palatal obstruents but having initial consonant clusters of some sort, and in having voiceless nasals and liquids. Most recent reconstructions also describe an atonal language with consonant clusters at

7420-646: The 12-volume Hanyu Da Cidian , records more than 23,000 head Chinese characters and gives over 370,000 definitions. The 1999 revised Cihai , a multi-volume encyclopedic dictionary reference work, gives 122,836 vocabulary entry definitions under 19,485 Chinese characters, including proper names, phrases, and common zoological, geographical, sociological, scientific, and technical terms. The 2016 edition of Xiandai Hanyu Cidian , an authoritative one-volume dictionary on modern standard Chinese language as used in mainland China, has 13,000 head characters and defines 70,000 words. Mu (unit of area) On 7 January 1915,

7560-497: The 1876 expansion the hotel was "four large neo-Renaissance brick buildings linked together by stone passageways." American travel writer Thomas Wallace Knox (1835–1896) stayed there in 1879, providing a positive review in his Boy Travellers in the Far East . In January 1877 plans were announced to construct a Turkish bath on the Seward Road frontage as part of the expansion of the Astor House. In 1881 Jansen renewed his lease of

7700-645: The Astor House Hotel Co., Brauen "ran off with a huge chunk of hotel funds just three months before the hotel opened, six months behind schedule, in January 1911." A total of $ 957 had been embezzled by Brauen. A warrant for his arrest was issued by the Mixed Court of Shanghai, but Brauen had already left Shanghai on a Japanese steamship. Brauen was spotted in Nagasaki on Thursday, 14 September 1910, but evaded capture. At

7840-716: The Astor House Hotel in June 1923. A 1920 travel guide summarised the features of the Astor House: "Astor House Hotel 250 rooms all with attached baths, the most commodious ballroom in Shanghai, renowned for its lobby, special dinner-parties, and balls. Banquets a special feature, and a French chef employed. Up-to-date hairdressing salon and beauty parlor . Strictly under foreign supervision." Chinese language Chinese ( simplified Chinese : 汉语 ; traditional Chinese : 漢語 ; pinyin : Hànyǔ ; lit. ' Han language' or 中文 ; Zhōngwén ; 'Chinese writing')

7980-475: The Astor House Hotel with the trustees of the Wills' Estate for a period of thirty years. In July 1882, the Astor House Hotel became the first building in China to be lit by electricity, and in 1883 it became the first building in Shanghai to install running water. In 1882 the Astor House hosted the first Western circus in China. By the end of 1887, the Astor House was described by Simon Adler Stern as "the principal American hotel in Shanghai" The Astor House Hotel

8120-404: The Astor House each Saturday night. Shanghai was considered the "Paradise of Adventurers", and the "ornate but old-fashioned lobby" of the Astor House was considered its hub. The lobby was furnished with the heavy mahogany chairs and coffee tables . By 1918 the lobby of the Astor House, "that amusing whispering gallery of Shanghai", was "where most business is done" in Shanghai. After China signed

8260-399: The Astor House was the center of social activity." Renovations to the Astor Hall were completed in time for the annual St. Andrew's Ball on Wednesday, 30 November 1892. In 1894 the Astor House was described as a "first class hotel in all these words imply" and was listed in Moses King's Where to Stop.": A Guide to the Best Hotels of the World . After her husband's death, Ellen Jansen operated

8400-413: The Astor House, and "a more genial and hospitable gentleman never carried out the duties of that position." Room rates were between $ 7 and $ 10 per day (Mexican). The hotel employed 254 people, with each hotel department "under special European supervision". The 1904 announcement of the rebuilding of the Central Hotel (reopened in 1909 as the Palace Hotel ) as a luxury hotel on the Bund, and the demolition of

8540-417: The Astor House. The Astor House remained in her control until 1 November 1900. By 1896 the Hotel was managed by Canadian-born Lewis M. Johnson, who was responsible for booking the first motion pictures to be shown in Shanghai on Saturday 22 May 1897 in Astor Hall. On 5 November 1897, China's first prom was hosted at the Astor House, which celebrated the 60th birthday of Cixi , the Emperor Dowager, thus "ending

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8680-403: The Astor is more tangy than elsewhere. All the latest scandal of the town is an old story in its lobbies almost before it occurs." Powell added: "At one time or another one saw most of the leading residents of the port at dinner parties or in the lobby of the Astor House. An old resident of Shanghai once told me, "If you sit in the lobby of the Astor House and keep your eyes open you will see all of

8820-530: The Chinese shops that occupied the newly leased property at the rear of the existing hotel were demolished. However, the new northern section of the hotel contained only 120 rooms, less than half of the number that Vernon had envisaged. An outbreak of cholera in the city resulted in few guests when the northern wing was opened in November 1903. It was managed originally by "an eccentric American" octaroon , Louis Ladow (died in China on 20 November 1928), who had been imprisoned in Folsom Prison , who subsequently built

8960-583: The Country" promulgated in 1959. Now the Chinese measurement system stipulates that 1 mu is equal to 60 square zhang , which is approximately equal to 666.67 square meters; 15 mu is equal to 1 hectare; 1 square kilometer is equal to 1500 mu . In Macau , mu is also the basic area unit of Chinese measurement. One mu is defined as 761.4 square meters. On 24 August 1992, Macau published Law No. 14/92/M that Chinese units of measurement similar to those used in Hong Kong, Imperial units , and United States customary units would be permissible for five years since

9100-399: The Grand Carleton Hotel in Shanghai in 1920. Under Ladow's supervision, his bartenders served "the finest cocktails in the Far East", a reputation it maintained through the 1930s. In 1904, the Hotel was considered "by far the best hotel in the whole of the East, including Japan." At this time, Mr A. Haller was the manager. About this time, the Hotel's managers wrote letters "complaining to

9240-469: The Hotel charged about $ 10 a day Mexican for accommodation, "a room in the "steerage" ... [cost] $ 125 a month, including meals and afternoon tea. That figured out at about $ 60 in United States currency." According to Powell, the "steerage" section ... consisted of single rooms and small suites at the back of the hotel. The section resembled an American club, because practically all of the rooms and suites were occupied by young Americans who had come out to join

9380-449: The International Arms Embargo Agreement of 1919, "sinister-looking German, American, British, French, Italian, and Swiss arms dealers appeared in the lobby of the Astor House . . . to dangle fat catalogs of their wares before the eager eyes of any buyers." In 1920, the lobby "with its convivial atmosphere, presents to the visitor a welcome oasis, where congregate travelers from afar to chat pleasantly." Another recorded: "The effervescence at

9520-490: The Latin-based Vietnamese alphabet . English words of Chinese origin include tea from Hokkien 茶 ( tê ), dim sum from Cantonese 點心 ( dim2 sam1 ), and kumquat from Cantonese 金橘 ( gam1 gwat1 ). The sinologist Jerry Norman has estimated that there are hundreds of mutually unintelligible varieties of Chinese. These varieties form a dialect continuum , in which differences in speech generally become more pronounced as distances increase, though

9660-412: The Premises. Rates from $ 6; Special Monthly Terms." An advertisement in Social Shanghai in 1910 bragged, "The Astor House Hotel is the most central, popular and modern hotel in Shanghai. At the time of its re-opening in January 1911, the refurbished Astor House Hotel was described as follows: The building has five storeys and attics on the Whangpoo Road frontage and four storeys on the Astor Road side. On

9800-407: The Richards Hotel and Restaurant were relocated to the site leased from Charles Wills on the northern banks of the Suzhou Creek. The new Hotel was a two-story East India style building. In February 1858 Richards' store and the Richards Hotel and Restaurant were relocated to the site leased from Charles Wills on the northern banks of the Suzhou Creek , near its confluence with the Huangpu River in

9940-466: The St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church in the French Concession. That evening, they departed on their honeymoon in the USA and Scotland, and returned to Shanghai early in 1912. The Secretary of the Hotel, Mr. Whitlow, was appointed acting manager, but was soon replaced by Mr. Olsen. On 3 November 1911, during the Xinhai Revolution that would lead to the collapse of the Qing dynasty in February 1912, an armed rebellion began in Shanghai, which resulted in

10080-589: The United States and Japan were also located in row up the row from the Hotel. On 29 August 1842, the Treaty of Nanjing declared Shanghai to be one of five open treaty ports in China, the others being Guangzhou , Amoy , Fuzhou , and Ningbo . On 17 November 1843, Shanghai was declared open to foreign traders, and soon after the British concession in Shanghai was established and the boundaries gradually defined. Afterward,

10220-468: The annual meeting of Astor Hotel Co. in September 1911, Mr. F. Airscough, the chairman, reported that Brauen had been "a thoroughly capable hotel Manager" but who had "left our employment under most regrettable circumstances". Costing $ 360,000, the restoration was completed in December 1910, and the official opening was on Monday, 16 January 1911. The North-China Herald reported: The enduring impression of

10360-400: The building also housed a "soda-water maker" by the name of F. Farr. By October 1868 George Baker was the proprietor of the Astor House. By August 1873 it had been purchased by DeWitt Clinton Jansen . In 1876 the Astor House Hotel was enlarged, with fifty new rooms added that were often used to accommodate newly arrived families who were awaiting the completion of their own residences. After

10500-485: The bulk of travelers to 19th century Shanghai. One contemporaneous account describes corridors and floors whose color and design echoed those on ships. Almost a century later, John B. Powell erroneously recounted the origins of the Hotel: "The Astor House Hotel ... had grown from a boarding house established originally by the skipper of some early American clipper , who left his ship at Shanghai. A string of sea captains followed

10640-589: The capture of the city on 8 November 1911, and the establishment of the Shanghai Military Government of the Republic of China, which was formally declared on 1 January 1912. Business proceeded for the Astor House Hotel, where rooms were available from $ 6 to $ 10 per night. However, the effects of the Revolution and the long absence of Gerrard resulted in a three-month operating loss of $ 60,000. On 30 June 1912,

10780-686: The company "a considerable sum of money". By 1904, Vernon was living in Tangku (Tanggu), and was the owner of the steamship George , which was seized that year off Liaotishan as a prize of war by the Empire of Japan , after transferring goods to Russia during the Russo-Japanese War . Subsequently Vernon was manager of the Hotel de France and from 1916 the Keihin Hotel in Kamakura, Japan . As Vernon had planned,

10920-400: The consulate, commercial attaché 's office, or business firms whose activities were undergoing rapid expansion. Sanitary arrangements left much to be desired. There was no modern plumbing. The bathtub consisted of a large earthenware pot about four feet high and four feet in diameter....The Chinese servant assigned to me would carry in a seemingly endless number of buckets of hot water to fill

11060-501: The crooks who hang out on the China coast." According to Ron Gluckman, "Opium was commonplace, says one woman who lived in Shanghai before World War II. 'It was just what you had, after dinner, like dessert.' Opium and heroin were available via room service at some of the old hotels like the Cathay and Astor, which offered drugs, girls, boys, whatever you wanted." In 1919, Zhou Xiang (周祥), "an Astor House bellboy , rewarded for recovering

11200-537: The current nine-year lease of the hotel and its property with the Land Investment Company for an additional twenty-one years, of the entire block , which included all the Chinese shops at the rear of the hotel, thus greatly expanding its holding but also increasing substantially the company's debt. Vernon intended to demolish the Chinese shops to allow the construction of a new three-storied wing containing 250 rooms, thus increasing its capacity to 300 rooms, with

11340-429: The death of principal architect Brenan Atkinson in 1907, he was replaced by his brother, G. B. Atkinson. The intention was to rebuild the hotel "on modern lines", using reinforced concrete as the primary building material. Included in the plans were: "the dining room, facing the Soochow Creek , is to be extended along the whole front of the building. Winter gardens are being constructed, the writing and smoking rooms, and

11480-399: The different spoken dialects varies, but in general, there has been a tendency to a reduction in sounds from Middle Chinese. The Mandarin dialects in particular have experienced a dramatic decrease in sounds and so have far more polysyllabic words than most other spoken varieties. The total number of syllables in some varieties is therefore only about a thousand, including tonal variation, which

11620-484: The difficulties involved in determining the difference between language and dialect, other terms have been proposed. These include topolect , lect , vernacular , regional , and variety . Syllables in the Chinese languages have some unique characteristics. They are tightly related to the morphology and also to the characters of the writing system, and phonologically they are structured according to fixed rules. The structure of each syllable consists of

11760-594: The dome. Additionally, the Hotel now had a 24-hour hot water supply, some of the earliest elevators in China, and each of the 250 guest rooms had its own telephone, as well as an attached bath. A major feature of the reconstruction was the creation of the Peacock Hall, "the city's first ballroom", "the most commodious ballroom in Shanghai". The newly restored Astor House Hotel was renowned for its lobby, special dinner-parties, and balls." According to Peter Hibbard, "[D]espite their architectural bravura and decorative grandeur,

11900-620: The effective date of the Law, 1 January 1993, on the condition of indicating the corresponding International System of Units (SI) values, then for three more years thereafter, Chinese, Imperial, and US units would be permissible as secondary to the SI. The Chinese units of measurement used in Hong Kong are similar to those used in Macau. In 1976 the Hong Kong Metrication Ordinance allowed

12040-623: The end of November 1889 Jansen agreed with the Shanghai Land Investment Company to transfer the Astor House Hotel and its land to the proposed Shanghai Hotel Company (SHC). To allow for the expansion of the Astor House and the construction of a new one-hundred bedroom hotel and large assembly hall, the SHC would also purchase the land at the back of the Hotel, so that the property would extend from Whangpoo (Huangpu) Road to Broadway, and from Astor Road to Seward Road. By 1890, "For foreigners

12180-566: The end of the syllable, developing into tone distinctions in Middle Chinese. Several derivational affixes have also been identified, but the language lacks inflection , and indicated grammatical relationships using word order and grammatical particles . Middle Chinese was the language used during Northern and Southern dynasties and the Sui , Tang , and Song dynasties (6th–10th centuries CE). It can be divided into an early period, reflected by

12320-531: The finishing touches of a picturesque uniform. During 1914, the Astor Gardens, the portion of the hotel grounds at the front of the Hotel known as "the foreshore" that had stretched to the Suzhou Creek, was sold to allow the construction of the consulate of the Empire of Russia immediately in front of the Hotel. By October 1914, the Hotel's financial position had improved sufficiently to allow the shareholders to approve

12460-413: The first one, 十 , normally appears in monosyllabic form in spoken Mandarin; the rest are normally used in the polysyllabic forms of respectively. In each, the homophone was disambiguated by the addition of another morpheme, typically either a near-synonym or some sort of generic word (e.g. 'head', 'thing'), the purpose of which is to indicate which of the possible meanings of the other, homophonic syllable

12600-502: The first sound film in China was shown at the Hotel. At this time there were still restrictions on Chinese entering the Astor House Hotel. At the annual meeting of the Astor House Hotel Company held at the hotel in October 1913, the directors revealed plans to increase profit by another reconstruction, including the construction of a new theatre seating 1,200 people to replace Astor Hall, which seated only 300; additional luxury suites; and also

12740-453: The first western movies shown in China were shown at the Astor House Hotel. On 9 June 1908, a motion picture with some sound was first shown in China in the open air in the hotel's garden. Construction finally commenced in November 1908, and was scheduled to be completed by July 1909. However, delays postponed completion until November 1910. In September 1910, days after the annual meeting of

12880-680: The foreign-run Shanghai Municipal Council about " natives ," " coolies " and " rickshaws " making too much noise for patrons to bear." By July 1906, retired British naval officer Captain Frederick W. Davies (born about 1850; died 16 January 1935 in Shanghai), who had previously been a sea captain on the NYK European Service, and associate manager of the Grand Hotel in Yokohama , had become manager of

13020-532: The foreshore property between Whangpoo Road and the Suchow Creek, for 25,000 taels (US$ 33,333.33). On 11 December 1913, the Astor House Hotel hosted a banquet for both the New York Giants of John McGraw and Chicago White Stockings of Charles Comiskey baseball teams, which included Christy Mathewson and Olympian Jim Thorpe , who were touring the world playing exhibition games . This transnational tour

13160-491: The form of a word), to indicate a word's function within a sentence. In other words, Chinese has very few grammatical inflections —it possesses no tenses , no voices , no grammatical number , and only a few articles . They make heavy use of grammatical particles to indicate aspect and mood . In Mandarin, this involves the use of particles such as 了 ; le ; ' PFV ', 还 ; 還 ; hái ; 'still', and 已经 ; 已經 ; yǐjīng ; 'already'. Chinese has

13300-475: The formative years of both the Palace and Astor House Hotels were overshadowed by an inability to cater for the fast changing tastes of Shanghai society and her visitors". In 1911, John H. Russell, Jr. told his daughter, the future Brooke Astor , that the Hotel offered "the finest service in the world", and that in response to her question about "a man dressed in a white skirt and blue jacket beside every second door",

13440-419: The four sides of a city block and linked together by long corridors. In the center of the compound was a courtyard where an orchestra played in the evenings. Practically everyone dressed for dinner, which never was served before eight o'clock. According to Powell, "Since most of the managers of the Astor House had been sea captains, the hotel had taken on many of the characteristics of a ship." While at that time

13580-599: The government of the People's Republic of China, with Singapore officially adopting them in 1976. Traditional characters are used in Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and among Chinese-speaking communities overseas . Linguists classify all varieties of Chinese as part of the Sino-Tibetan language family , together with Burmese , Tibetan and many other languages spoken in the Himalayas and the Southeast Asian Massif . Although

13720-465: The ground floor of the new wing to provide first class accommodation for retail stores. Debentures with a return of 6% were issued in July 1901 to finance the expansion of the hotel, with the expectation that the increased number of rooms would generate a surplus of income to repay the dentures expeditiously. In 1902, after less than two years of leadership, Vernon retired because of ill-health, and left owing

13860-530: The ground floor, at the corner of Whangpoo Road and the Broadway, is a handsomely appointed public bar-room and buffet , 59 ft (18 m). by 51 ft (16 m) .; in the centre, with main entrance from Whangpoo Road, is a magnificent lounge ball, 70 ft (21 m). by 60 ft (18 m) ., and at the East end are the Hotel office and the manager's office, with the secretary's office, in mezzanine , above

14000-425: The hot months, electric fans are worked. A gallery runs down either side, and in the busy season is also filled with tables. A band plays nightly....'Boys' moved hither and thither dressed in long blue shirts over which were worn short white sleeveless jackets, the latter obviously full dress, as they were dispensed with at breakfast or tiffin . Soft black shoes over white stockings, and legs swathed with dark felt were

14140-581: The language of administration and scholarship, a position it would retain until the late 19th century in Korea and (to a lesser extent) Japan, and the early 20th century in Vietnam. Scholars from different lands could communicate, albeit only in writing, using Literary Chinese. Although they used Chinese solely for written communication, each country had its own tradition of reading texts aloud using what are known as Sino-Xenic pronunciations . Chinese words with these pronunciations were also extensively imported into

14280-461: The large dining room at the Astor House Hotel in Shanghai on 8 October 1907, with over 280 in attendance; it was, at that time, "the largest affair of the kind ever given in China." During the dinner, Taft made a significant speech on the relationship between the United States and China, and supporting the Open Door foreign policy previously advocated by John Hay . Organized Sunday School work in China

14420-516: The late 19th century. Today Japanese is written with a composite script using both Chinese characters called kanji , and kana. Korean is written exclusively with hangul in North Korea, although knowledge of the supplementary Chinese characters called hanja is still required, and hanja are increasingly rarely used in South Korea. As a result of its historical colonization by France, Vietnamese now uses

14560-408: The latter. The basement fronting Astor Road contains store-rooms, the steam-heating apparatus, and motor fire-pump. The grand staircase, with marble dado and red panels on white background, leads upward to passenger lifts , a ladies cloak room , a very prettily furnished ladies' sitting room, a reading room with several comfortable sofas and easy chairs upholstered in leather, a private buffet with

14700-455: The more conservative modern varieties, usually found in the south, have largely monosyllabic words , especially with basic vocabulary. However, most nouns, adjectives, and verbs in modern Mandarin are disyllabic. A significant cause of this is phonetic erosion : sound changes over time have steadily reduced the number of possible syllables in the language's inventory. In modern Mandarin, there are only around 1,200 possible syllables, including

14840-425: The mutual unintelligibility between them is too great. However, calling major Chinese branches "languages" would also be wrong under the same criterion, since a branch such as Wu, itself contains many mutually unintelligible varieties, and could not be properly called a single language. There are also viewpoints pointing out that linguists often ignore mutual intelligibility when varieties share intelligibility with

14980-583: The nasal sonorant consonants /m/ and /ŋ/ can stand alone as their own syllable. In Mandarin much more than in other spoken varieties, most syllables tend to be open syllables, meaning they have no coda (assuming that a final glide is not analyzed as a coda), but syllables that do have codas are restricted to nasals /m/ , /n/ , /ŋ/ , the retroflex approximant /ɻ/ , and voiceless stops /p/ , /t/ , /k/ , or /ʔ/ . Some varieties allow most of these codas, whereas others, such as Standard Chinese, are limited to only /n/ , /ŋ/ , and /ɻ/ . The number of sounds in

15120-510: The nearby Garden Bridge, and construction of the current Waibaidu Bridge in 1907, which involved the resumption of part of the Astor House Hotel's property, forced the owners of the Astor House Hotel to begin extensive renovations. From February 1907, the hotel's manager was Swiss citizen Walter Brauen, a skilled linguist who had been recruited from Europe. The existing hotel was described as "the leading hotel of Shanghai...., but has an unpretentious appearance." The company decided to embark on

15260-578: The newer Chinese units of measurement to private sales and trade in Article 11, effective on 1 January 1930. These newer "market" units are based on rounded metric numbers. And mu remains the base unit. In mainland China, mu is the only area unit retained after the traditional Chinese measurement system was discontinued in the "Decree of the State Council Concerning the Use of Uniform Legal Measures in

15400-500: The original as managers of the hotel. The very first public meeting of the British settlement was held in the newly opened Richards' Hotel on 22 December 1846. In August 1850 Richards advertised that a reading room for shipmasters had been established in his hotel. On 1 March 1856 his company was renamed "Richards & Co." and on 15 May 1856, while in New York on business, Richards' company

15540-455: The other is a luxuriously furnished lounge, and, adjoining this, the reading, smoking, and drawing rooms . The dining room has accommodations for five hundred persons. It is lighted with hundreds of small electric lamps , whose rays are reflected by the large mirrors arranged around the walls, and when dinner is in progress, and the band is playing in the gallery, the scene is both bright and animated. There are some two hundred bedrooms, each with

15680-538: The other varieties within the same branch (e.g. Southern Min). There are, however, transitional areas where varieties from different branches share enough features for some limited intelligibility, including New Xiang with Southwestern Mandarin , Xuanzhou Wu Chinese with Lower Yangtze Mandarin , Jin with Central Plains Mandarin and certain divergent dialects of Hakka with Gan . All varieties of Chinese are tonal at least to some degree, and are largely analytic . The earliest attested written Chinese consists of

15820-781: The previous year, in April 1920, Morton was forced to resign as the manager of the Shanghai Hotels Companies, Ltd, due to a new British government Order in Council restricting management of British companies to British subjects. Morton subsequently left Shanghai in May 1920 on board the steamer Ecuador . Morton was replaced by Canadian Walter Sharp Bardarson (born 20 September 1877 in Roikoyerg, Iceland); died 17 October 1944 in Alameda, California ). who became an American citizen after he resigned from

15960-493: The private bar and billiard room will be enlarged and the kitchen placed upon the roof." A new reinforced concrete wharf measuring 1,180 feet (360 m) long and 200 feet (61 m) wide was also constructed. Prior to the new construction, future US President William Howard Taft , then US Secretary of War , and his wife, Helen Herron Taft , were honoured at a banquet organised by the American Association of China in

16100-404: The rate of change varies immensely. Generally, mountainous South China exhibits more linguistic diversity than the North China Plain . Until the late 20th century, Chinese emigrants to Southeast Asia and North America came from southeast coastal areas, where Min, Hakka, and Yue dialects were spoken. Specifically, most Chinese immigrants to North America until the mid-20th century spoke Taishanese ,

16240-604: The re-building of the three principal wings of the Astor House Hotel. The Astor House Hotel was to be restored to a neo-classical Baroque structure, making it once again "the finest hotel in the Far East". The new addition (the Annex) was based on plans drawn by "Shanghai's leading architects of the time", British architects and civil engineers , Brenan Atkinson and Arthur Dallas (born 9 January 1860 in Shanghai ; died 6 August 1924 in London), established as Atkinson & Dallas in 1898. After

16380-552: The related subject dropping . Although the grammars of the spoken varieties share many traits, they do possess differences. The entire Chinese character corpus since antiquity comprises well over 50,000 characters, of which only roughly 10,000 are in use and only about 3,000 are frequently used in Chinese media and newspapers. However, Chinese characters should not be confused with Chinese words. Because most Chinese words are made up of two or more characters, there are many more Chinese words than characters. A more accurate equivalent for

16520-509: The relationship was first proposed in the early 19th century and is now broadly accepted, reconstruction of Sino-Tibetan is much less developed than that of families such as Indo-European or Austroasiatic . Difficulties have included the great diversity of the languages, the lack of inflection in many of them, and the effects of language contact. In addition, many of the smaller languages are spoken in mountainous areas that are difficult to reach and are often also sensitive border zones. Without

16660-497: The remaining shares purchased by six separate individuals. The shares were soon trading for up to $ 300 each. The Astor House Hotel Ltd. was "incorporated under the Company Ordinances of Hong Kong", with Vernon becoming the managing director . Later that month, as a response to the severe shortage of accommodation in the rapidly growing International settlement, Vernon was able to convince the company to negotiate an extension of

16800-405: The renovation plans, which included demolishing the old dining room and kitchen to create eight shops that could be leased, and first class bedrooms and small apartments; construction of a new dining room in the centre of the hotel; relocation of the kitchen on the top floor to allow the conversion to bachelor's bedrooms; and conversion of part of the bar and billiard room into a grill room. Despite

16940-697: The renovations, financial difficulties persisted that resulted in the trustees for the debenture holders foreclosing on the Hotel in August 1915. In September 1915, the trustees subsequently sold the Astor House Hotel Company Limited and all of its property and assets, including over 10 mow of land, to Central Stores Limited, owners of the Palace Hotel, for 705,000 taels. With the change of ownership, Gerrard's services were no longer required. Central Stores Ltd. (renamed The Shanghai Hotels Limited in 1917)

17080-536: The resident foreign population of the British concession increased: "In 1844 [at years end] it was 50, in the following year 90, and after five years it had grown to 175. In addition there was a 'floating population,' consisting of the men on shore from the ships in harbour." Among the first foreign residents of Shanghai was Peter Felix Richards , a Scottish merchant. Richards had been doing business in China from about 1840; and in 1844 had established P.F. Richards & Co. (of Shanghai and Fuzhou ). P.F. Richards operated

17220-505: The six official languages of the United Nations . Standard Chinese is based on the Beijing dialect of Mandarin and was first officially adopted in the 1930s. The language is written primarily using a logography of Chinese characters , largely shared by readers who may otherwise speak mutually unintelligible varieties. Since the 1950s, the use of simplified characters has been promoted by

17360-557: The slightly later Menggu Ziyun , this dictionary describes a language with many of the features characteristic of modern Mandarin dialects. Up to the early 20th century, most Chinese people only spoke their local variety. Thus, as a practical measure, officials of the Ming and Qing dynasties carried out the administration of the empire using a common language based on Mandarin varieties , known as 官话 ; 官話 ; Guānhuà ; 'language of officials'. For most of this period, this language

17500-529: The social stricture that women should not attend social events"; One traveller indicated in 1900, "the Astor-House Hotel at Shanghai, it might be called European with a few Chinese characteristics. We of course had Chinese to wait on us here". In July 1901, Vernon privately floated the Astor House Hotel Co. Ltd. with a capital of $ 450,000. 4,500 shares were issued for $ 100 each, and were fully subscribed with Vernon or his nominees taking 4,494 shares, with

17640-609: The tonal distinctions, compared with about 5,000 in Vietnamese (still a largely monosyllabic language), and over 8,000 in English. Most modern varieties tend to form new words through polysyllabic compounds . In some cases, monosyllabic words have become disyllabic formed from different characters without the use of compounding, as in 窟窿 ; kūlong from 孔 ; kǒng ; this is especially common in Jin varieties. This phonological collapse has led to

17780-547: The traditional Western notion of a word. A Chinese cí can consist of more than one character–morpheme, usually two, but there can be three or more. Examples of Chinese words of more than two syllables include 汉堡包 ; 漢堡包 ; hànbǎobāo ; 'hamburger', 守门员 ; 守門員 ; shǒuményuán ; 'goalkeeper', and 电子邮件 ; 電子郵件 ; diànzǐyóujiàn ; 'e-mail'. All varieties of modern Chinese are analytic languages : they depend on syntax (word order and sentence structure), rather than inflectional morphology (changes in

17920-464: The tub in the morning. In 1915, soon after taking control of the Astor House Hotel, Ezra decided to add a new ballroom. The new ballroom, designed by Lafuente & Wooten , was opened in November 1917. In July 1917, the assistant manager was Mr. Goodrich. Around the end of World War I, the Sixty Club, a group of sixty men-around-town (a mixture of actors and socialites ), and their dates would meet at

18060-512: The use of tones in Chinese is the application of the four tones of Standard Chinese, along with the neutral tone, to the syllable ma . The tones are exemplified by the following five Chinese words: In contrast, Standard Cantonese has six tones. Historically, finals that end in a stop consonant were considered to be " checked tones " and thus counted separately for a total of nine tones. However, they are considered to be duplicates in modern linguistics and are no longer counted as such: Chinese

18200-452: The words in newspapers, and 60% of the words in science magazines. Vietnam, Korea, and Japan each developed writing systems for their own languages, initially based on Chinese characters , but later replaced with the hangul alphabet for Korean and supplemented with kana syllabaries for Japanese, while Vietnamese continued to be written with the complex chữ Nôm script. However, these were limited to popular literature until

18340-508: The written language used throughout China changed comparatively little, crystallizing into a prestige form known as Classical or Literary Chinese . Literature written distinctly in the Classical form began to emerge during the Spring and Autumn period . Its use in writing remained nearly universal until the late 19th century, culminating with the widespread adoption of written vernacular Chinese with

18480-558: Was "a landmark of the white man in the Far East, like Raffles Hotel in Singapore." During 1889, The Shanghai Land Investment Company Limited (SLIC), which was formed in December 1888, purchased the "extensive estate known as the Wills' Estate, which includes the site of the Astor House Hotel, and possesses one of the best business situations in Hongkew" for 390,000 taels, approximately US$ 290,000. By

18620-453: Was a koiné based on dialects spoken in the Nanjing area, though not identical to any single dialect. By the middle of the 19th century, the Beijing dialect had become dominant and was essential for any business with the imperial court. In the 1930s, a standard national language ( 国语 ; 國語 ; Guóyǔ ), was adopted. After much dispute between proponents of northern and southern dialects and an abortive attempt at an artificial pronunciation,

18760-544: Was born at Shanghai on 4 May 1907. "This beginning of Sunday-school history in China took place in Room 128 of the Astor House, Shanghai, occupied at that time by Mr. [Frank A.] Smith." The opening of a tram line in March 1908 over the new Garden bridge along Broadway (now Daming Lu) past the Astor House Hotel by the Shanghai British Trolley Company, greatly increased both access and business. Also in this period,

18900-671: Was declared insolvent by decree of the British Consular Court in Shanghai, and all of his assets (including the Richards' Hotel) were assigned provisionally to his creditors , Britons William Herbert Vacher and Charles Wills. According to Shanghai historian Peter Hibbard, the completion of the Wills Bridge allowed the expansion of the over-crowded settlement. Wills, who owned the land on the northern side of Suzhou Creek, benefited from increased property values. During 1857 Wills leased

19040-538: Was even a " steerage " section with bunks instead of beds at cheaper rates." American journalist John B. Powell, who first arrived in Shanghai in 1917 to work for Thomas Franklin Fairfax Millard , the founder of what later became The China Weekly Review , described his new accommodation at the Astor House Hotel: "the Astor House in Shanghai consisted of old three- and four-story brick residences extending around

19180-481: Was hidden by their written form. Often different compounds for the same concept were in circulation for some time before a winner emerged, and sometimes the final choice differed between countries. The proportion of vocabulary of Chinese origin thus tends to be greater in technical, abstract, or formal language. For example, in Japan, Sino-Japanese words account for about 35% of the words in entertainment magazines, over half

19320-463: Was led by Albert Goodwill Spalding , owner of the White Stockings, "professional baseball's most influential figure." At that time, "No hotel in Shanghai, and few in the world, surpassed the Astor House Hotel. A handsome and impressive stone edifice of arched windows and balconies, the hotel stood six stories high and sprawled over three acres of land near the heart of the city. On 29 December 1913

19460-591: Was owned 80% by Edward Isaac Ezra (born 3 January 1882 in Shanghai; died 16 December 1921 in Shanghai), the managing director of Shanghai Hotels Ltd., the largest stockholder, and its major financier , At one time, Ezra was "one of the wealthiest foreigners in Shanghai". According to one report, Ezra amassed a vast fortune estimated at from twenty to thirty million dollars primarily through the importation of opium and successful real estate investment and management in early twentieth century Shanghai. The Kadoorie family , Iraqi Sephardic Jews from India, who also owned

19600-451: Was told by Russell: "They are the 'boys'. ... When you want your breakfast or your tea, just open the door and tell them." In October 1910, Scotsman William Logan Gerrard, who was a long-time resident of Shanghai, was appointed the new manager, but severe illness forced him into hospital for several weeks, before being invalided home temporarily. Soon after his release from the hospital, Gerrard married Gertrude Heard on Tuesday 19 July 1911 at

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