Shanghai EKA Tianwu Treasure Hotel: Stay in an Artistic Utopia Inside a Century-Old Bund Granary!

Shanghai EKA Tianwu Treasure Hotel: Stay in an Artistic Utopia Inside a Century-Old Bund Granary!

🌾 Pushing open this rusted bronze door felt like triggering a time-travel mechanism. Built in 1908, the Minsheng Granary has now transformed into the most hardcore industrial-style art museum hotel in Shanghai. The weathered concrete pillars carry the damp scent of the Huangpu River, and the elevator shaft still retains the original tracks used for transporting grain last century—this isn’t just checking in; it’s like signing for a time capsule delivered across a hundred years.

🛏️ Our "Tiangong" suite felt like being inside a contemporary art installation. In the 15-meter-high space, metal mesh clouds floated above, and Italian Flos lighting cast geometric patterns on the rugged walls. The most stunning feature was the wall facing the shower—completely preserved chalk records of grain storage from the last century. When hot water steam rises, those blurred writings briefly reappear, and for a moment, you can almost hear the dock workers’ calls blending with the modern shower’s drizzle.

🍽️ The rooftop restaurant hides the most rebellious "Granary Renovation Project"! The chef turns coarse grains like brown rice and buckwheat into trendy molecular cuisine, strongly recommending the "Granary Afternoon Tea": green bean mousse shaped like mini grain stacks, black sesame macarons stamped with granary numbers, and even the latte art is a simple crane sketch. Sitting on the terrace sipping coffee while watching the Lujiazui skyline, you suddenly understand what it means to "chew history with contemporary teeth."

🎨 The hotel itself is a giant art museum! The basement houses the curator’s private collection of installation art. The piece called "Grain Universe," made from old burlap sacks and LED tubes, is soul-stirring. Every Saturday morning, artists lead tours, revealing that a rusty iron door in the corridor is actually a ready-made artwork by Xu Zhen, and the "Caution: Slippery Floor" sign in the elevator is a special creation by Qiu Anxiong—here, even fire hydrants might be art pieces.

💡 Three magical moments you must experience:
1️⃣ At 7 a.m., sunlight streams through the silo skylight, casting golden wheat patterns on the walls
2️⃣ Holding meetings in the conference room that preserves the grain chute (the projector is installed on an old bucket elevator)
3️⃣ Ordering a "Rice Fragrance Sour" cocktail in the late-night lounge, where the bartender uses dry ice to recreate the granary’s misty insect-repellent spray effect

🛎️ Butler service details that impress:
• Turndown service brings peach gum stew served in an enamel pot
• The minibar snacks are stored in tin grain scoops, and when restocked, the attendant says, "Let me stock you up with some more grain"
• Noticing us lingering over the old-fashioned thermometer in the corridor, we received the same style as a creative souvenir upon checkout

📸 Photo tips for great shots:
√ Wear camel tones and pose silhouetted in front of the silo elevator
√ The spiral staircase in the courtyard looks like a giant wheat cross-section from above
√ Let the projector cast pages from the ancient book "Tiangong Kaiwu" onto your face

💬 Real experience notes:
Bringing my parents, they praised it as "cultured," but the many stairs were definitely tiring; the deliberately preserved concrete textures in the room can easily stain light-colored clothes; art tours must be booked three days in advance; and the legendary SPA room, converted from the granary manager’s lounge, really has a faint scent of rice grains...

Post by BookTreeRainHatcat | Jun 17, 2025

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