The Astor Hotel History Museum

The Astor Hotel History Museum occupies the basement and ground-floor heritage wing of the Astor Hotel, founded in 1863 by British missionary John Innocent and expanded into its present Victorian-style brick building by 1924, making it one of the oldest continuously operating Western-style hotels in China. The hotel hosted a roster of prominent early-20th-century guests, including Puyi (the last Qing emperor, who married Empress Wanrong at a reception here in 1922), Herbert Hoover, Bertrand Russell and Zhou Enlai, and China's first telephone call was reportedly placed from the hotel's lobby. The museum, opened in the 2000s within the hotel's original basement kitchens and cellars, preserves brick vaulted ceilings and structural ironwork from the 1863 and 1924 building phases and displays period furniture, china, guest registers, photographs and mechanical artefacts including an early elevator mechanism and safe. The exhibition follows a chronological path tracing the hotel from its 1863 founding through its Republican-era heyday to its role after 1949, using restored guest rooms and lobby recreations alongside object cases. Restoration work retained original masonry and ironwork rather than replacing it, so much of the museum's fabric is the hotel's actual 19th- and early-20th-century structure rather than reconstruction.