Sleep next to toilet: cheap micro hotel rooms popular with short-stay students go viral in China, causing debate over basic set-up with ‘subtle’ smell
- A hotel offering micro rooms with a toilet next to the bed has started a heated debate on mainland social media
- The hotel charges just US$8.7 per night and is popular with visiting patients at a nearby health centre and students preparing for their exams
A hotel offering micro rooms with a toilet right next to the bed for 60 yuan (US$8.7) per night has generated heated discussion in China.
Red Star News reported that the eight-square metre room is being offered by a hotel in a residential community in Zhengzhou, the capital city of Henan province in central China.
It attracted widespread attention on the mainland after a blogger uploaded video footage showing the tiny room and its controversial toilet on the video platform bilibili.com last month.
The blogger, known as Hei Mao Zhang, spent just three hours in the room and did not stay overnight, said the room has basic facilities and is clean.
“But the bed is too close to the toilet. The smell in the room is a bit ‘subtle’,” he said, implying the room smells unpleasant due to a toilet being located in the tiny room.
In his video, besides the bed and the toilet, there is an air conditioner, a wash basin, a mirror, a coat hanger, a kettle, a ventilator and a landscape painting in the room.
The blogger said he found the low-priced room online and went to experience it out of “curiosity”, the report said.
“I opened a door and saw a corridor. On both sides of the corridor are such small rooms which should be part of an apartment that has been split into five to six small cubicles.”
The hotel owner told Red Star News that the micro rooms are in high demand. Most of his guests are patients or relatives using a major health centre a few hundred metres away. The remaining guests are students staying for several days to prepare for tests.
The room’s video has been viewed two million times on bilibili.com and another two million times on Weibo, with thousands of comments left on the posts.
“Even a prison cell is bigger than this,” one person said.
“Maybe if he switches to the other side of the bed to sleep, he will find the ‘smell’ less prominent,” another observed.
One commenter said: “60 yuan per night means 1,800 yuan a month. You can rent an apartment in fairly good condition for this amount of money. Why do some people choose to live in such a small room with a toilet near the bed? It’s depressing.”
A local TV station in Shanghai reported in 2021 that some “capsule hotels” had appeared in downtown areas, charging 35 yuan for a bed per night. Each guest was offered just a bed while toilets were communal. Authorities said there were fire hazards in hotels with such a high density of dwellers.
