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Noel Coward's Shanghai hotel defaced by film crew

Posted on: Friday, 26 May 2006, 04:14 CDT

SHANGHAI (Reuters) - Shanghai's historic Bund waterfront Peace Hotel, where Noel Coward wrote "Private Lives," has been illegally daubed with red Chinese characters by a crew filming a romantic movie, a state newspaper said on Friday.

The crew painted the characters on to window panes on the hotel's 1929-built north building on Monday night, apparently unaware they were breaking the law, the Shanghai Daily said.

"We have done a lot to protect the environment and architecture," the paper quoted production manager Xu Wen as saying. "If it is still not enough, we say sorry."

Water used to remove the paint dyed the street red, the newspaper said.

The art deco hotel, which in 2003 celebrated its 100th anniversary, in its 1930s heyday welcomed such guests as Charlie Chaplin and George Bernard Shaw.

It is protected by a cultural relics law, as are many of the surrounding buildings built when Shanghai was a colonial outpost known as the "Pearl of the East" for its architecture, but also "Whore of the Orient" for its decadent nightlife.

It is not the first film crew to run into trouble with the Chinese authorities.

Earlier this month, China said it would fine the crew of "The Promise," the country's most expensive movie yet, for damaging the environment in an area of outstanding natural beauty.

The producers had not applied for permission to build roads and buildings around Bigu lake in Yunnan province in China's southwest, and left a trail of detritus behind them, including around 100 concrete pilings, state media said.

Source: REUTERS

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