Former Site of Hankou Zanyu Soda Water Factory

In 1997, when the Zhongshan Warship was raised from the muddy bed of the Yangtze, a perfectly sealed bottle of Zanyu soda water emerged from the wreckage—its glass unbroken, its contents still clear after half a century underwater. That single bottle testified to the quality of a factory that had once stood at the corner of Dongting Street and Chezhan Road, a three-story brick-and-timber structure built in 1918 as the first mechanized soda water plant in Hankou.

The factory was an offshoot of the British-run Zanyu Pharmacy, and all its machinery came from England. With a daily capacity of 1,000 dozen bottles, it competed fiercely with the neighboring Heli Soda Water Factory, another British enterprise in the French Concession. Production continued through the turbulent decades of flood and war, but by 1948 the plant had lost its market and ceased operations. Its equipment was leased to Heli, and the final shutdown came in late 1949. The building itself, however, remained—a silent witness to the rise of modern beverage industry along the central Yangtze.

Architecturally, the factory adopted a restrained Renaissance Revival style, its symmetrical facade anchored by full-height pilasters that divided the front into three vertical bays. The corner section, where Dongting Street meets Chezhan Road, was given extra emphasis with heavy corner piers, a recessed ground-floor column, and a projecting third-floor balcony framed by elliptical windows and circular arches. Above, a continuous curved parapet wrapped the roofline, lending the industrial structure a dignified, almost civic presence. Inside, the original wooden staircase remained worn smooth by generations of workers, and the louvered doors on the upper floors survived intact for nearly a century.

Today, the Former Site of Hankou Zanyu Soda Water Factory is listed as a municipal second-class protected building and a first-level industrial heritage site. Yet a severe fire in February 2013 scarred its interior, and the structure now stands partly derelict, its faded brick facade still holding the corner as passing residents occupy the remaining rooms. The factory no longer produces anything, but the soda bottle recovered from the sunken warship—now a museum piece—keeps alive the taste of an industrial past that once fizzed and bubbled on the streets of old Hankou.