The descriptions printed on the reverse side of the cards is shown above each image.
"Sun Moon Lake in Central Taiwan" and "Confucius Temple, Taipei, Taiwan"
The Golden Dragon Lobby. The Grand Hotel, Taipei.
Taipei. A part of the northern city with Yuan-shan (the Round Hill),The Grand Hotel, Tansui (the Light Water), the Kiddie Playground,and the Zoo in view.
5 comments:
Question re: the last postcard. Why does the Grand Hotel lack color and not look like what I remember? Could it be that this postcard was pre-recontsruction or something like that. The higher mountain in the upper background is the extinct volcano Tatun that also appears on a Japanese park stamp set from 1941. Beautiful memories.
I don't know when the reconstruction was, but it's possible that the color just wasn't very good on the postcard, which would have been from the 1950s or early 60s.
The Grand Hotel of today bears no resemblance to the hotel as it appeared in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The stages of its construction are described in Wikipedia at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuanshan_Grand_Hotel
The color in the postcard is pretty much the way the hotel looked in 1959-1960. If my memory is right, the section under the orange roof going off to the left of the main building was added after I left in 1960.
Stev,
You are correct in that the Grand Hotel I saw when I arrived in early 1965 looks more like the Grand Hotel seen today as described in Wikipedia.
The 3rd and 4th photos are the way I remember the hotel in the early 60's. I got to meet Madam Chang at the hotel once. Two of us Photographers from the USTDC photo lab were sent up to photograph a meeting of Madam Chang and a group of American Chamber of Commerce people. When we got there she politely dismissed us saying we would not be needed. I guess someone got the wires crossed. I really wanted to take her photo but was too stunned to ask. I don't know what the truth is; but we always had heard that it was Madam Chang's hotel. I don't know how much truth there was to that. Everyone said that she was the real money and power behind everything.
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