The Peninsula Hotel [1927- ]

I'm surprised how long it took before the camouflage paint added by the Japanese was removed / covered over. It's still visible on photos dated 1948 and 49.

At first I thought maybe it was because the hotel was still used by the British military for several years after the war. But the hotel group website has an entry for 1946 saying "The Hong Kong establishments returned to the company's control after being requisitioned."

So are the dates on the photos wrong, or did the camouflage paint really last that long? Was it just too expensive to cover over at a time when money was in short supply?

in the immediate post-war period the hotel was also used a centre for Jewish refugees from Shanghai. 
https://www.hongkongheritage.org/html/eng/index.html#/image/peninsula/

http://www.asianjewishlife.org/pages/articles/AJL_Issue_11_Jan2013/AJL_C...

according to this, the fountain, which must date from the 1930s, ended up at the True Light Middle School

https://www.flickr.com/photos/131889665@N05/25074991393/in/pool-2674798@N22/

Pre-war I remember 'the Pen' as the height of luxury, its ambience so impressive.   I had tea there with a friend just before our war.

In the 1950's my husband small children and I spent two days there before sailing on Home leave. 

Years ago I read somewhere that Noel Coward wrote one of his plays while staying in the Pen, 'Private Lives' I think.    But I don't know if that is true!

My grandfather was posted to Hong Kong for a few months immediately following the war and had a number of interesting adventures there (https://gwulo.com/node/41256). He mentioned having a farewell party in the Officers' Club at The Peninsula the night before being demobbed:

We had reserved the large dining-room in the Officers' Club on the tenth floor, seventy invited guests sat down to dinner and, at 10pm or so, I made a body-count of those who 'just came for the beer' and gave up at one hundred and eighty. 

It looks like the hotel only had 6 floors, so he must have been mistaken about that detail, but presumably the club was on the top floor of the hotel. I'll be in Hong Kong for my birthday this year and would love to go for a drink in the same place, but apparently all the restaurants today are on the ground floor or first floor. Does anybody know where the Officers' Club would have been? Was there a room on the upper floor in 1946 that has since been converted to suites? I called the hotel to ask, but the person on the phone didn't know about the history, and I couldn't find anything on the website to suggest that they have any historians on their marketing team.

In 1946, the Rose Room would have been the Officers' Club. See here

Thank you! Very helpful.

Another good source is the Hong Kong Heritage Project (https://www.hongkongheritage.org/Pages/home.aspx). They run the archives of the Kadoories' businesses, including the Peninsula.

David asked back in 2010 about the duration of the camouflage on the Peninsula hotel's exterior post WWII.

Here is an eye witness account of it being still there in 1948 by Brian D. Wilson who arrived in HK on 23rd December 1948:

By the time I arrived in Hong Kong, three years after the liberation in 1945 (there was actually two weeks' gap between the Japanese surrender and the arrival of the first British forces in the Colony), there were few obvious signs of wartime damage, such as was commonplace at that time in London. But one prominent feature of war was the exterior of the Peninsula Hotel in Kowloon. It was still covered in olive, brown and green camouflage paint.

And of course this photo dated 14th June 1949 still clearly show the camouflage on the Peninsula’s exterior

Did we ever find out when the camouflage eventually got painted over?