For tenants, nothing smells sweeter than Guanghua Road

The "scent" of Guanghua Road, for its current tenant companies, smells like a bottle of perfume with its front, middle and base notes: Its past industrial legacy gives a chilly scent, the current prosperous development exhales a warmer odor, and its future yields a mysterious yet appealing fragrance.

The burgeoning innovative industrial park in Minhang District's Zhuanqiao Town used to be a flagship block noted for some of Shanghai's export-oriented industrial brands, where resident Xu Lihong's parents and their generation felt honored to work.

"The neighborhood used to house the Qunli Chemical Plant, Shanghai Paint Factory, Jinbei Slippers Company, Triangle Ceiling Fan Factory and Fenglei Plumbing Equipment Plant," Xu said.

"As society progressed and industrial components changed, some maladjusted businesses moved out, so did some mass-producing manufacturers and heavy-polluting plants, leaving behind their dilapidated factories," said Xu, now head of Guanghua Innovative Industry Development Co, a property management company of the Guanghua Creative District.

An industrial allocation plan was approved at the beginning of 2017, with the future Guanghua Creative District to include four valleys, its fashion innovation, digital innovation, innovation headquarters and industrial design valleys; two streets, its cultural and innovation leisure street and riverfront leisure street; and two parks, its innovation culture park and riverfront leisure park.

The planned area for renovation will cover 74.79 hectares, encircled by Humin Road in the east, Zhongchun Road in the west, Liuleitang River in the south and Guangzhong Road in the north.

"The renovation blueprint requires us to preserve quality companies and help them with industrial upgrading. For those maladjusted businesses, we had to ask them to move out," said Xu.

The block went through a relocation of high-voltage wires and rods, and a facelift of its entrances, greenery spaces and lighting.

It launched its first graffiti festival in 2017, giving the old factory walls a new look.

In 2018 the first Guanghua development forum was successfully held.

The innovative district has completed renovating parks including the 79 Creative Park at 68, 79 and 128 Guanghua Road, the Surpass Space Creativity Guanghua Ku at 335 Guanghua Road, the Yuangu Culture and Innovation Park at 689 Guanghua Road, the Renovation Apartment at 638 Guanghua Road and the Guanghuayuan at 445 Guanghua Road.

Fragrance souvenir

Boitown, a domestic perfume brand created in Shanghai, is a tenant company situated inside the creative district.

In the first Guanghua development forum in 2018, the perfume brand was the fragrance supplier for the event's souvenir.

"The Memory, Moment, Future" was the name of the souvenir perfume, which contained three bottles referring to the history, current development and best wishes for the future of the Guanghua Road.

"Several co-founders of Boitown gathered one day – one a perfume and essential oil trader, one a perfumier, and me – and we chatted and got a little tipsy after some beer. The smart and diligent Chinese should have a world-famous perfume brand of our own, we agreed. Then we founded Boitown, set up scent labs and did countless fragrance experiences," said Ding Xuan, a co-founder of Boitown.

The group of young people chose a warehouse on Guanghua Road as their site of entrepreneurship before the block began its renovation. They moved out halfway due to business expansion, but returned after the neighborhood matched again to their development.

"We embrace trial and error. It costs if we make a mistake, but it costs more if we avoid to make a mistake," Ding said.

In 2018 when livestreaming became a new trend for selling goods, Boitown also tried to sell its perfume that way.

"Livestreaming emphasizes visual impression, a bottle of perfume with its transparent package and transparent liquid leaves no strong visual impact," Ding said.

"Then we tried quicksand perfume. The oozing colored quicksand created an appealing visual effect. Furthermore, to avoid the quicksand from blocking the spray nozzle, we designed a reflux device," said Ding.

Relying mostly on online distribution, Boitown also used moving stories to promote its perfume styles, such as an ill-fated lovers' story of a perfumier and her soldier lover during World War II. The perfume she finally designed had a fruit-scented front note and a bitter-salt scented base note.

The company won global recognition as its founders hoped in 2019 through launching a co-branding style of perfume with the British Museum.

"The amazement we feel about Guanghua Road is that it is always growing and changing, as we are also growing," said Ding.

A trip to the creative district can be an eye-opening experience.

Zou Wei and his After Art studio in Guanghua Creative District are mounting and framing artworks in a novel way.

"Shanghai has about 300 mounting studios. Speaking of mounting, people will easily think of those Chinese calligraphy works with big characters such as "天道酬勤" ("God helps those who helps themselves") and "大鹏展翅" ("A great hawk spreads its wings"). But it's pathetic if people's spiritual worlds are so confined within like this," said Zou, a former fine art student.

"Nowadays young people are likely to prefer mounting works that strike a chord with their soul. Such as a child, when he grows up to be 10 or 15 years old, a tiny sweater which his grandmother had weaved personally for him when he was a baby can be artwork framed and mounted on a wall," said Zou.

As the China Art Museum will launch a Dunhuang-themed exhibition from September to December, After Art is designing a mounting art souvenir for the event.

They print the images of the nine-color fairy deer on rammed earth, and through magnetic attraction, the artwork is attached into its frame. All the components of the souvenir can be folded into a gift box.

The Refined Space European antique furniture museum inside the neighborhood's 79 Creative Park boasts a collection of more than 2,000 pieces of antique furniture. Song Di, its founder, was a furniture maker for more than a decade.

"Even if I continued to be a furniture manufacturer for 50 years, I still couldn't have surpassed the delicate skills applied in 19th-century European furniture making," said Song.

He spent three years doing surveys abroad and planning on the transformation.

In 2012 Song closed his furniture factory and switched to the trade of European vintage furniture collection and transactions.

His strength is in selecting vintage furniture from the Georgian, Victorian and Edwardian periods. The types of furniture in his collection range from dining tables, bookshelves, cabinets, sofas and chairs, to timepieces and sculpture.

His studio in Guanghua Creative District is an old factory house with a steep roof.

Vintage furniture

The exhibition hall is decorated in the industrial age style in deep brown. Its ship searchlight as a chandelier and industrial age pipelines match well with his collection of European vintage furniture.

Among his collection, his favorite is a Davenport table found in the UK in 2013.

The table earned its name from a captain named Davenport at the end of the 18th century. As a writing desk, it was usually delicately made and could be easily moved into wagons and ships.

A challenging task for a furniture collector is to repair furniture and restore their tints if transport causes any damage.

Song had spent three years in finding a solution and finally encountered an expert restorer from Edinburgh and invited him to lecture on his shellac furniture skills in China for a month.

"European vintage furniture is popular in Shanghai, a city noted for its East-meets-West haipai-style furniture," said Song.

Being a tenant company in Guanghua Creative District provides opportunities for Song to brainstorm through exchanges with the rest of the creative business owners.

In September, the vintage furniture museum will hold a porcelainware exhibition in collaboration with Italian kitchen appliance manufacturer Smeg. Song's expectation for his museum is to expand it to include an exhibition hall that displays his collection in chronological order.

For white-collar workers and designers in the creative district, working in Guanghua can be a satisfying experience.

"The environment appeals to us and food and facilities are good," said Xie Mengmeng, a salesperson at Juezhi Studio, a fabric design brand noted for its computer weaving skills.

"Tremendous changes took place on Guanghua Road. It has changed from a road where taxi drivers fear to approach due to its poor road and surrounding conditions, to an innovative district noted for its 1,280 promising enterprises," said Xu.

"We're promoting it with multiple city-walk routes: such as a dining and shopping route, a route to introduce its innovative achievements, and a route that especially caters to art and design lovers," she added.

About Zhuanqiao Town

Besides its Guanghua Road, Zhuanqiao Town in Minhang District is also celebrated for its well-preserved cultural aspect. Its paper-cutting, waist drum dancing and parasol twirling are listed as Shanghai's city-level intangible culture heritage. Zhuanqiao was awarded "Town of the Chinese Folk Art" by the Ministry of Culture of China from 2011 to 2013. Its Zhuanqiao Double Ninth Festival Cake Fair features its bucket steamed rice cakes.