The Peace Hotel, which Bao and his uncle have chartered for a long time, is a landmark in Shanghai, but some people confuse it with the movie "Peace Hotel" starring Chow Yun-fat. In fact, the fictional background of the movie is the twenties of the last century, and the real Peace Hotel was not called this name at that time.
Today, the Peace Hotel consists of two parts, the South Building and the North Building, which historically belonged to different owners. Among them, the South Building was formerly known as ** Hotel, which was bought by the British Huizhong Foreign Company in 1903 and renamed Huizhong Hotel.
The North Building of the Peace Hotel, formerly known as the Chinachem Hotel, was built by Chinachem Real Estate, a subsidiary of the British New Sassoon & Co., and the backstage owner was Victor Sassoon, the richest man in Shanghai, so the Chinachem Hotel is also known as the Sassoon Building.
In 1956, the Chinachem Hotel resumed business and was renamed the Peace Hotel. In 1965, Huizhong Hotel was merged into the Peace Hotel, and the Peace Hotel became what it is today. It can be said that the Peace Hotel has witnessed the ups and downs of Shanghai for more than 100 years, and the fate of the Peace Hotel itself is also closely linked to the fate of Shanghai, just like a big ship that rises and falls with the rise and fall of Shanghai.
One of the darkest events in the history of the Peace Hotel occurred during the Sino-Japanese War.
After the outbreak of the Lugou Bridge Incident in 1937, Japan began a full-scale invasion of China. On August 13, two officers and soldiers of the Japanese army stationed in Shanghai, Yuo Oyama and Yozo Saito, forcibly stormed Hongqiao Airport and were killed by the squadron. The Japanese army then used this as an excuse to demand that the Chinese troops dismantle the fortifications, withdraw from Shanghai, and punish the alleged perpetrators, but the squadron refused, and the Battle of Songhu broke out immediately.
On the second day of the incident, the squadron dispatched fighter planes to bomb the Japanese strongholds around the Huangpu River such as Hongkou and Huishan Wharf, as well as the Japanese Marine Corps Headquarters in Shanghai.
During the fierce battle, two bombs fell from the sky, one hit the Huizhong Hotel, directly blowing up the roof of the Huizhong Hotel, and the other landed on the road in front of the Chinachem Hotel. Suddenly, masonry pillars fell from the sky, and shrapnel mixed with sand flew from the ground in all directions. The large glass of the dessert shop of the Chinachem Hotel was shattered, the glass canopy was blown down, and a large crater was blown out of the ground in front of the door. The south and north buildings of the Peace Hotel were hit hard at the same time.
At that time, the people of Shanghai believed that the concession area was a relatively safe place based on past experience, so before the Sino-Japanese war, a large number of people who fled from Zhabei and Hongkou flocked here. From the Bund to the Great World, there are crowds of people who have taken refuge everywhere. Two shells landed in this area, causing a great deal of human life**.
* At the scene, the corpses were piled up, and most of the people were blown apart, unrecognizable, and they could no longer distinguish their appearances. Authorities sent trucks to carry the bodies out one by one, and the scene became a living hell. According to later statistics, the two bombs that hit the Zhonghua Mao Hotel and the Huizhong Hotel killed a total of 729 people.
On the same day, two more bombs fell in front of the Great World, killing and injuring more than 1,000 people.
*Later, the consulates of various countries in Shanghai proposed ** and imposed martial law in the concession. But once the war began, ** was a dead letter, and the Battle of Songhu kicked off.
Due to the chaos of the war at the time, there are different theories about the origin of these bombs. Some say that this is a shell fired by an anti-aircraft gun on a Japanese battleship that fell into the concession, and some say that the bomb came from a ** fighter. According to the statement given by the Shanghai local chronicle, these bombs actually came from a fighter plane, and during the air raid, its bomb rack was damaged, and the bombs on the plane fell to the ground and caused a huge number of people.
* At the time of the incident, Victor Sassoon, the owner of the Chinachem Hotel, was in his office on the fourth floor of the hotel, and according to him, he only felt a slight vibration in the window at that time, and the whole building was not damaged. Four years later, the Pacific War broke out, Chinachem and Huizhong were occupied by the Japanese, and Sassoon had no choice but to flee China.
Of course, with the establishment of New China, everything has changed to a new look, there will be no foreign ** on the Huangpu River, and there will be no more shells falling at any time in the sky over Shanghai.