Last month, Brother Ying shared with my sister Hui and me a year-old article entitled 《曾经的’万人大厂’，蝶变为‘时尚地标’》(= "Once a 'Big Factory with Ten Thousand People', Metamorphosed into a 'Fashion Landmark'") . It was a story about how the Shanghai No. 17 Cotton Textile Factory had been morphed from the largest textile factory in the city of Shanghai into an international fashion center.
It was such an exciting article that I promptly shared it with my WeChat Group of Language Training Class. As usual, it sank like a dead rock into the deep sea. It dawned on me once again that such news was way too low-brow for my high-achieving classmates to patronize, especially as it was about Yangpu, one of the lower east-end districts in the city of Shanghai. Successful people should avoid such places like a plague.
Undeterred by the silence, we three siblings were heartily discussing what Shanghai No. 17 Textile Mill had meant to us and our family. In 1922, Nissho Corporation founded its first textile mill in Shanghai, the Nissho Yufeng Textile Co., Ltd., at No. 2866 Yangshupu Road, Yangpu District, along the bank of east Huangpu River. It was a prevailing business practice then in the textile industry to establish its factories in the east end of towns or cities, due to the flow of river from west to east.
Since its founding in 1922, the Nissho Yufeng had undergone a series of ownership changes. After World War II in September 1945, it was taken over by the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Kuomintang. The following year, it was controlled by China Textile Co. Ltd. under the new name of China Textile Corporation No. 17 Textile Factory. In 1949, the Shanghai Textile Industry Bureau took control and renamed it Shanghai No. 17 Cotton Textile Factory, or simply Seventeen Cotton. Unlike many other textile mills in Shanghai, Seventeen Cotton boasted the largest areas covering about 181 acres in two factory locations separated across each other by Yangshupu Road, one of the major traffic arteries from the east to the west of Shanghai. The two locations, known as South Mill, and North Mill were maned by more than ten thousand employees.
During the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), it was one of the strongholds for the Shanghai Workers Revolutionary Rebels led by Hongwen Wang (1935-1992) one of the members of the Gang of Four. With China opening up after the1990s, the textile industry in Shanghai became increasingly irrelevant, and unsustainable as a state-owned enterprise. Owing to the stiff competition from less expensive and more mobile textile workshops or factories outside the city, a total of 37 textile mills were shut down one after another, and Seventeen Cotton was the last mill to close its doors, and moved to Dafeng, Jianshu Province in 2007.
From 2009 to 2013, the Shanghai Textile Group, a mere shadow of the former powerful Shanghai Textile Corporation, embarked on a makeover project for Seventeen Cotton, in order to revive it into a factory Shanghai would need, to keep up with global fashion trends, and to make Shanghai the sixth largest fashion city in the world, after New York, Paris, London, Milan and Tokyo. By 2013, the Shanghai International Fashion Center had officially been completed, with six self-contained parts, i.e., multi-functional show venue, reception club, creative office, boutique warehouse, apartment hotel and catering, and entertainment.
Because of the original two-part layout of Seventeen Cotton, the Center has conveniently been divided into the South and North Districts. The former's immediate proximity to the Huangpu River is a great advantage with a unique river view, while the latter has been converted into apartments, offices and parking lots, and other catering and entertaining functions. The conversion is a source of pride for the locals and the government alike. The Center has earned a series of awards, such as the 2013 Excellent Unit of Shanghai Industrial Tourist Attraction Service Quality, 2015 National 4A Tourist Attraction, and 2017 Top Ten National Industrial Heritage Tourism Bases.
Seventeen Cotton is the only surviving entity standing in the same address.
No comments:
Post a Comment