On first visiting Shanghai over 30 years ago, I stayed at the Broadway Mansions hotel, at a time when Communist China was still emerging from political self-isolation.
Like the city itself, the Art Deco building was dilapidated, and the staff uncertain about a foreign visitor. But the hotel retained a touch of its former grandeur, not least in its superb views over the Huangpu river and expensive details such as full-length brass piano-style hinges on the bedroom doors.
The receptionists could not or would not tell me who had financed such luxury in China in the 1930s. The answer, I later learnt, was one of the world’s richest entrepreneurs — Victor Sassoon, a man who deserves to be much better known in history than he is.
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