A poster from the Mao era hangs near the entrance to the Chongqing Asbestos Factory, depicting a burly worker exhorting all to “strive to build the nation into a modern and powerful socialist country!”
Once this might have quickened the hearts of the factory’s workers. But today, it is no more than a surrealistic touch, lending ambience to Chongqing’s latest hipster-industrial art space, alongside statues of a giant teapot and dripping tap.
The plant was once at the heart of the Dadukou district on the outskirts of the south-western city of Chongqing, a former industrial centre and China’s second world war capital. But since 2014 it has been transformed.