Peter Hibbard

Fields of expertise: Shanghai / Architecture and History

Language: English

Peter Hibbard has been professionally involved with China travel and tourism for 24 years and is the pre-eminent authority on the historical development of foreign travel and tourism in China. His intensive archival research on the development and growth of Shanghai over the last 150 years continues to this day and forms the basis for his exclusive city promenades, presentations and publications. He is the author of The Bund Shanghai: China Faces West (Odyssey Books, 2007). Two other books Peace at The Cathay – A Century of International Hospitality on the Bund Shanghai (Earnshaw Books) and Beyond Hospitality: The History of the Asia’s Oldest Hotel Company, The Hongkong and Shanghai Hotels, Limited (Marshall Cavendish) will be published in early 2010. A trilogy From the Bund to the Bubbling Well Shanghai: Steps in the Making of a Modern Metropolis will be published in 2011. He is also author of the Odyssey Guide to Shanghai (2004, 2006, February 2010, now combined with Beijing) and has contributed text for Shanghai Through The Panoramic Eye - Photographs by Fumio Okada (2003), and written chapters for the Odyssey Yangzi River Guide (2004) and the TimeOut Guide to Shanghai (2004, 2006, 2008). He has also written a new Foreword for a reprint of the classic 1934 guide All About Shanghai (2008) and is featured in Barbara Baker’s anthology, Shanghai: Electric and Lurid City (1998). From 2001-2006 Peter was managing editor of China Welcomes You, a prestigious annual coffee-table introduction to the country. Recent special projects have included the production of a commemorative publication celebrating HSBC’s 140-year history in China and undertaking research to aid the current restoration of the former Holy Trinity Cathedral in Shanghai. He is presently Project Historian for Hirsch Bedner Associates in the restoration of the landmark Peace Hotel. He has appeared on Chinese and international TV and radio, and has been featured and recommended in such publications as Condé Nast Traveler, The Daily Telegraph, Departures, Hemispheres, Die Zeit, The Financial Times, South China Morning Post, Shanghai Daily, the Luxe Guide to Shanghai and Orient Express Magazine.

A British citizen, Peter was trained as a city planner and urban sociologist at Cardiff and Birmingham Universities, and undertook historical research at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He researched and lectured in tourism at the University of Hong Kong and the Beijing Institute of Tourism, having begun his career at Bournemouth University’s Tourism Department in 1982. Peter headed up the training department of a five-star hotel in Beijing and has a wealth of experience as a China tour director, having escorted over 80 business and tourist groups from Europe and North America. He first began devising cultural tours of Shanghai in 1993. Peter spent a total of 18 months travelling overland through every province and region of China in the 1980s. Following three years in Beijing, he first lived in Shanghai in the early 1990s and made the city his permanent family home in 2001. He is President of the Royal Asiatic Society China in Shanghai, Shanghai’s oldest established and most prestigious cultural society, and was awarded an MBE for his services to heritage conservation in Shanghai in the New Year Honours List of 2010.

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