Built in 1863 and demolished in 1887. The Oriental was one of Dunedin’s larger hotels. It had a bar and a restaurant, and was the venue of lodge meetings, coroner’s inquests, the organization of walking races, and its fair share of disorderly behavior. It was a mostly respectable establishment, however, and its accommodation included ‘private rooms for families’. In 1883, an English artist who had toured New Zealand described the hotel as ‘rather of an American type, and, I must say, the most elegant building of the kind I have seen since leaving San Francisco’.
