Throwback Thursday: February 9, 2009, the CCTV Tower Hotel Burns, with No Opening in Sight

Throwback Thursday: Feb 9, 2009, the CCTV Tower Hotel Burns, Still No Opening in Sight

Steven Schwankert | Feb 9, 2017 11:30 am | Add a comment | 2724 reads

Throwback Thursday takes a look back into Beijing's past, using our nine-year-strong blog archives as the source for a glance at the weird and wonderful of yesteryear.

UPDATED: Mandarin Oriental Hotels has informed the Beijinger it expects both of its planned Beijing hotels to open in 2018.

2017 will finally see the opening of the Mandarin Oriental hotel in Beijing. But it likely won't be the one of which most people think.

On February 9, 2009, in a Lantern Festival fireworks display gone wrong, the Mandarin Oriental Hotel, also known as That Tower Next to the CCTV Building, caught fire and burned from the top down, unlike most fires. The hotel's design, with a giant, 90-meter atrium at its middle and guest rooms arranged on opposite sides, created a "massive chimney," according to one observer at the time who had toured the property prior to the fire, once the ceiling had burned through.

The fire stopped traffic in the central business district and nearby area, drew huge crowds of onlookers, and was visible for kilometers around in the night sky. One firefighter sadly lost his life in the fire.

While the fate of the building and those responsible hung in the balance, the charred hulk of the building remained at the side of the Third Ring Road, standing like an upright shipwreck, a reminder of a night gone wrong and a situation unresolved. Ultimately, in 2010, 20 people were sentenced to jail terms for the fire, with Xu Wei, who had been the head of CCTV's construction department (no connection to the rock musician of the same name) receiving a seven-year jail term, and others getting between three and six years.

A complete renovation of the burned-out hulk was completed in 2013, with the Mandarin Oriental nameplate visible since at least 2014, but there is still no indication when the hotel might open. No Beijing properties are listed on the hotel group's website, nor are Beijing properties listed as "under development," while an upcoming property in Doha, Qatar, is.

The Mandarin Oriental's other Beijing hotel, announced in June, 2015, will open in 2018, according to a representative from Mandarin Oriental Hotels. That property, called the Mandarin Oriental Wangfujing, will have only 74 rooms, on the top two floors of the new WF Central building near Wangfujing Dajie and Daruanfa Hutong.