Fairmont Peace Hotel

This guide to the Fairmont Peace Hotel in Shanghai turns on room 314, where the playwright Noel Coward checked in mid-tour of Asia in 1930, came down with a bad case of influenza, and refused to leave until he had turned a half-formed idea into a play. Along the way it traces the hotel's own construction by the British tycoon Sir Victor Sassoon, the Art Deco tower of Lalique glass and copper roofing that once hosted guests like Charlie Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw. Best heard looking up at that copper roofline from the street below.