Shanghai’s Old Towel Factory

Youth hostel type places keep springing up across Shanghai and many of them are rather nice with cheap restaurants and bars attached. One of Access Asia’s young researchers from Malaysia passed through town last weekend and stayed in one I didn’t know (I’m a bit old to be hanging round youth hostels without a valid excuse quite honestly!). This time I arranged to meet him at the hostel as I was quite interested in seeing it.

The Le Tour Traveler’s Rest is up Lane 319 along Jiaozhou Road (formerly Kiaochow Road) up behind Jing’an Temple and used to be the largest towel producing factory in Shanghai supplying the local citizens with all their towel and flannel needs. The place has been turned into a nice hostel with good amenities and a nice design and is pretty quiet being right at the end of the lane. The owners have kept the place pretty much structurally intact though obviously modified it for its current use.

There’s nothing stunningly architectural to be seen that would get it into the architecture books but the building was completed sometime in the 1930s and was a functioning building. The owners claims that much of the furniture, flooring and panelling that you see in our guest rooms and common areas are made from the original timber and it does have a nice woody feel. Anyway, nothing stunning but a small bit of the city’s industrial history tucked away up a lane and now functioning as something else successfully.

If you’re young and on a budget or not too old and cheap (or perhaps old, bankrupt and passed caring) you could do worse – here’s their website