It was never supposed to be a hotel. In 1858, William Thierry, baron Van Brienen van de Groote Lindt, a personal advisor to King William III, bought three houses on the Lange Voorhout, tore them down, and hired the architect Arend Roodenburg to build him a city palace for the staggering sum of 150,000 guilders. The baron wanted somewhere to throw parties in the political capital of the country. He got a ballroom, stables, an inner court, and a rotunda built so that horse-drawn carriages could enter through the main door, deposit their passengers, and turn around inside the building - a piece of architectural theatre still standing today as the hotel's tea room. The baron died in 1863. His son Arnold found the palace too large for anyone to actually live in and sold it. The hotelier François Paulez bought it, gave it to his daughter Alegonda, and she opened it as a hotel on May 1, 1881.

The hotel borrowed its name and its coat of arms from a famous Hotel des Indes in Batavia, hoping to draw travellers from the Dutch East Indies. It worked. By 1900, under the Savoy-trained manager Christian Haller, every room had hot and cold running water, telephones, and an intercom to the front desk. In 1899, when Tsar Nicholas II called the world's first international Peace Conference at The Hague, Haller out-bid every other hotel in the city to be the official one, and the Indes became a 'home away from home' for diplomats, royals, scholars and artists for the next century. The guest book reads like an unhinged dinner party. Empress Eugenie of France in 1881. Cecil Rhodes in 1899. Theodore Roosevelt in 1910. Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria in 1911 - three years before Sarajevo. John Philip Sousa, Henry Ford, Igor Stravinsky, Eisenhower, Churchill, Mitterrand, Tony Blair. Charles Lindbergh stayed. Michael Jackson stayed. Prince stayed.

The most haunting of the hotel's stories belong to its women. The exotic dancer and accused spy Margaretha Zelle - Mata Hari - is reported in Hague legend to have spent her last night in the Netherlands at the Indes before crossing into France, where in 1917 she was arrested, tried, and shot by firing squad. Anna Pavlova's 1931 death from pneumonia, on her way to perform in The Hague, gave the hotel a salon named in her memory. Only a few months after Pavlova died, the wiring for a 73rd birthday party for Queen Mother Emma short-circuited and set the third floor on fire. The blaze gutted the upper floors and damaged the roof. Henri Rey, the Monegasque manager, used the rebuilding to finally add the fourth storey the original architect had planned and never built. Whatever the disaster, the hotel always seemed to gain a floor or a story by the end of it.

When Germany invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, Henri Rey tried to flee to England with his wife and children. The children made it. His wife was killed when Dutch forces, mistaking the car at the Hook of Holland, opened fire. Rey died in England in 1945. During the occupation, the Wehrmacht High Command made the Indes its Dutch headquarters; German officers drank in the same bar where peace-conference diplomats had drunk a generation earlier. And in the same building, hotel management quietly hid a small group of Jewish people from the Nazis. They all survived the war. The pigeon house Henri Rey kept on the roof is still there. After the war his son Jean Jacques, a Royal Air Force pilot, came back to run the hotel and converted the pigeon house into a room for his model trains.

By 1971 the world had moved on. Modern travellers wanted modern hotels, and the Indes announced its closure. Prime Minister Barend Biesheuvel, a regular at the dining room, had a last official dinner there with two ministers on October 27, and the three of them spent the evening calling everyone they knew to save the place. They convinced the entrepreneur Julius Verwoerdt to buy it from the Dutch government. He stripped out the coal stove, replaced the steam heating, redid the wiring, and reopened. In the 1970s and 1980s, parliamentarians met in private dining rooms here to argue out subjects too taboo for the chamber - same-sex marriage, abortion, euthanasia - in sessions later nicknamed the 'Des-Indes Deliberations.' The interior architect Jacques Garcia repainted the white facade yellow in 2005. Today the Hotel des Indes is part of The Leading Hotels of the World, still on the Lange Voorhout, still keeping watch over the ghosts.