Wooden carvings of two elephants and an eagle, meant to symbolise wisdom and prosperity, flank the entrance to the Chinese chemical producer Yunwei. Today, they suggest a very different interpretation: a lumbering debt load and scavengers picking over the company’s scraps.

“Lots of Chinese companies rushed to expand, to be the biggest in the world. This was a source of great pride. Now we see it as a headache,” says a soft-spoken Yunwei executive, back from a business trip where he was trying to sell more of the hard black coking coal piled high in the company’s storage facility in Qujing in the southwestern province of Yunnan.

The Shanghai-listed company never quite cracked the top tier of the chemical industry in China, let alone the world, but it was not for a lack of trying. It increased its assets 30-fold over the past decade in a spree of investment, building an ethyl acetate factory, a calcium carbide production line, a coal distillation plant and lots more.