[photopress:harbingardens.jpg,full,alignright]A new hotel in Harbin, capital of northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, has used 270 kg of gold bullion as a floor inlay. The gold bullion, bearing the inscription ‘Swiss Bank Corporation’ and ‘Paradise Island’, is embedded in two heart-shaped formations beneath transparent glass in the hotel lobby. RMB56 million ($7 million) was spent on acquiring and transporting the gold bullion. (As yet, we have not acquired a picture of this ground level treasure. When we do we will update the site.
Yin Yingchuan, sales director with Paradise Island Hotel, said, ‘The gold floor is a great innovation. A lot of customers have been coming in to take a look and some of them stayed to have dinner.’ Which is one point of view.
A primary school teacher have another. He said the gold floor was extravagant and in bad taste. ‘didn’t think a modern enterprise would act like that.’
An ordinary citizen, Xu Bin, gave the opposite point of view. He said, ‘The gold floor idea has made the newly-opened hotel famous right from the word go, and it is also a show of economic strength by the hotel operator.’
Professor Chen Yongchang, president of the Business Administration Executive College of Heilongjiang Province, said, ‘A sophisticated entrepreneur would use the money as working capital and expand the size of his business to reap profits. Paradise Island’s approach of immobilizing the money to show off, contradicts the academic concept of efficient capital utilization.’
Qu Wenyong, director of the department of sociology at Heilongjiang University, said the hotel’s extravagance could backfire and worsen social problems in a society where the income gap is becoming increasingly serious.
Source: People’s Daily Online
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