Broadway Mansions - Notable Guests

Notable Guests

According to its official website, Broadway Mansions Hotel has accommodated hundreds of leaders and government delegates from different nations around the world. Some of these include:

• New Zealand-born William Lancelot Holland (28 December 1907 - May 2008), Research Secretary and later Executive Secretary of the Institute of Pacific Relations (1928–1960), and editor of its periodical, Far Eastern Survey and Pacific Affairs, stayed at the Broadway Mansions for several months from July 1937;
• American aviator Royal Leonard (1905–1962), the personal pilot of Chiang Kai-shek, was staying at the Broadway Mansions during the initial days of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and was able to then fly to Hong Kong after the regular air service had been terminated due to aerial combat between Japanese and Chinese forces;
• Canadian socialist James Gareth Endicott (1898–1993), a controversial former United Church of Canada missionary, former advisor to Chiang Kai-shek, but from 1945 a supporter of the Communist Party of China and friend of Zhou Enlai, and founder in 1949 of the Canadian Peace Congress, and a 1952 winner of the Stalin Peace Prize, stayed at the Shanghai Mansions on a return visit to China in 1952 with his wife, Mary Austin Endicott;
• Swiss photojournalist Fernand Gignon, one of few non-Communist reporters permitted to enter the People's Republic of China in the early 1960s, stayed on the 3rd floor of the Shanghai Mansions, "le plus grand complexe locatif de la métropole."
• American businessman and human rights campaigner John Kamm spent a week at the Shanghai Mansions in January 1976 when he was a representative of the National Council for US-China Trade. His account was published as a part of a series in the Hong Kong Economic Journal.