This Grand Old Lady of the East, one of the last great 19th-century hotels, was established by the Armenian Sarkies Brothers in 1887 and was designated as a National Monument a century later, in 1987. It played host to famous authors Noel Coward, Rudyard Kipling (who once said, "Feed at the Raffles") and Somerset Maugham, film stars Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford, Alfred Hitchcock and Elizabeth Taylor, and royalty and world leaders.
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