At the river bend of Yinpenling, a factory gate survived the fire that consumed much of old Changsha.

The Former Site of Hunan No. 1 Spinning Mill began in 1912, when Wu Zuolin, a veteran revolutionary and adviser to the Hunan military government, secured approval from Tan Yankai and borrowed 600,000 silver dollars from the provincial finance office. On 257 mu of land beside the Xiang River, he founded Jinghua Spinning Mill, a joint official-merchant enterprise equipped for cotton yarn production. In 1913, it became provincially run and took the name Hunan No. 1 Spinning Mill.

Its history reads like a ledger written under pressure. In 1919, warlord Zhang Jingyao tried to sell the mill to Japanese merchants. Public opposition in Changsha stopped the deal. In 1920, equipment installation was completed, and merchants from Hubei leased the plant under the name Huashi Company. After business failure and closure, the province recovered it in 1926. Labor unrest reduced production in 1927. In 1928, the mill reopened with added weaving equipment.

By 1932, after Hunan’s first power loom entered the factory and began production, the renamed Hunan No. 1 Textile Mill had more than 3,000 workers. It produced cotton yarn and cotton cloth, including the Junshan and Yuelu yarn brands. Around the plant rose chimneys, workshops, roads, moored boats, ponds, pavilions, and flowers: industry with the smell of river mist, hot cotton, oil, and coal smoke.

War tore the factory from its riverbank. After the 1938 Wenxi Fire, part of its equipment was moved west, first toward Yuanling and then to Anjiang. There, in November 1940, production resumed. During the War of Resistance, the relocated mill made military cloth, donated fifteen aircraft, and later sent European-style office furniture to the Zhijiang surrender site.

The buildings that remain in Changsha carry their own drama. The Western-style gate and flanking offices, built in 1919, escaped the 1938 fire. The 13.5-meter brick-and-concrete gate stands on reinforced concrete columns with false-stone bases and sawtooth ornament. Its original dome was lost in wartime; a large five-pointed star still marks the upper frame. The office buildings combine Chinese and Western forms, with verandas, wooden floors, raised foundations for damp and flood protection, and nine ventilating skylights on the northern block.

The mill was renamed Yuxiang Textile Mill in 1948, taken over after Hunan’s peaceful liberation in 1949, renamed Changsha Textile Mill in 1966, and reorganized after bankruptcy in the 1990s. Since 2002, its surviving buildings have been protected as modern industrial heritage. They remain a hard, elegant memory of machines, workers, war, recovery, and the first force of modern industry in Hunan.