Culture
The Chinese City Bursting With Tchotchkes
In Yiwu, vendors in a gargantuan warehouse peddle the cheap goods the world knows so well.
Yiwu, China, has been called “the city the dollar store built.” Less than 200 miles south of Shanghai, its 46-million-square-foot market contains more than 60,000 vendors selling 400,000 geegaws. All the flotsam and jetsam of daily life—artificial flowers, stuffed animals, inner tubes, socks, dancing plastic Santas—are on display in what The Guardian described as “a heaving multistory monument to global consumption.”
Each cubicle is stuffed to the ceiling, often with variations of one type of commodity. Merchants come from all over the world, particularly the Middle East and Africa, to purchase objects at a lower price than they can find back home.