Spence's Hotel Calcutta by Frederick Fiebig 1851

Spence's Hotel was a

hotel A hotel is an establishment that provides paid lodging on a short-term basis. Facilities provided inside a hotel room may range from a modest-quality mattress in a small room to large suites with bigger, higher-quality beds, a dresser, a re ...

established in

Kolkata Kolkata (, or , ; also known as Calcutta , the official name until 2001) is the capital of the Indian state of West Bengal, on the eastern bank of the Hooghly River west of the border with Bangladesh. It is the primary business, comme ...

in 1830. It was near the

Government House Government House is the name of many of the official residences of governors-general, governors and lieutenant-governors in the Commonwealth and the remaining colonies of the British Empire. The name is also used in some other countries. Gover ...

. It no longer exists. Various sources describe Spence's Hotel as either the first hotel in Asia, or in India, or in Kolkata. The hotel is mentioned in Jules Verne's ''

The Steam House ''The Steam House'' (french: La maison à vapeur) is an 1880 Jules Verne novel recounting the travels of a group of British colonists in the Raj in a wheeled house pulled by a steam-powered mechanical elephant. Verne uses the mechanical house ...

'' as a place where the characters stay during a visit to Kolkata. On 16 January 1861

Duleep Singh Maharaja Sir Duleep Singh, GCSI (4 September 1838 – 22 October 1893), or Sir Dalip Singh, and later in life nicknamed the "Black Prince of Perthshire", was the last ''Maharaja'' of the Sikh Empire. He was Maharaja Ranjit Singh's youngest son, ...

met his mother

Jind Kaur Maharani Jind Kaur ( – 1 August 1863) was regent of the Sikh Empire from 1843 until 1846. She was the youngest wife of the first Maharaja of the Sikh Empire, Ranjit Singh, and the mother of the last Maharaja, Duleep Singh. She was renowned f ...

at the hotel. They had been separated in 1849 after the

Treaty of Lahore The Treaty of Lahore of 9 March 1846 was a peace-treaty marking the end of the First Anglo-Sikh War. The treaty was concluded, for the British, by the Governor-General Sir Henry Hardinge and two officers of the East India Company and, for the ...

when he was 10 years old and they reunited when he was age 22. From here, Singh brought his mother back with him to live in England. Because of political tension the British government choose Spence's Hotel as a neutral place where there was unlikely to be conflict.

References

{{coord missing, West Bengal Hotels in Kolkata Hotel buildings completed in 1830 Defunct hotels Demolished buildings and structures in India