This part of the elegant Grand Hôtel de Pekin of 1917, between the Forbidden City and the Wangfujing shopping street on the city’s main east-west boulevard, has been repeatedly reinvented and spent ten years as Raffles Beijing Hotel. Nowhere else in the city offers quite the same solid interior comfort and sense of East-meets-West history. It counts among its former guests Chinese politician Mao Zedong and Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw.
