Mandarin Oriental Bangkok

The Mandarin Oriental Bangkok stands on the bank of the Chao Phraya River, founded in 1876 as the Oriental Hotel, making it one of the oldest continuously operating hotels in Thailand. Its original nineteenth-century structure survives today as the Author's Wing, a colonial-style building of teak and whitewashed masonry preserved alongside later twentieth-century tower additions built as the hotel expanded, and named for a roster of literary guests, including Joseph Conrad and Somerset Maugham, who stayed there and, in several cases, wrote about their time in Bangkok. The hotel's river frontage and the Author's Wing's verandas and reading rooms were deliberately maintained through later renovations as a link to the building's nineteenth-century identity even as the surrounding property grew into a much larger modern resort complex. Long ranked among the leading hotels in Asia, it has hosted a range of heads of state, royalty and writers over more than a century of continuous operation.