Yiwu: The Chinese city where Christmas is made and sold

I visited Yiwu last year. It was fun looking around and seeing all of these item. But I imagined it to be lively, yet there were very few people shopping around in the area. I've asked the sellers why. They said it's because most of their clients buy their items online already but before there were a lot of people shopping at Yiwu.

Things to note: For Christmas shoppers, they only sell wholesale (1000 pcs or more depending on the product, 100 pcs if the item is pricey). Most stalls wouldn't sell you anything if you will only buy a few items even if you try to explain you need it as a product sample.

Since it is wholesale, make sure you order it in advance as most of their products are located in different province in China. Some of them have to ship it to Yiwu first and they would advice that your orders will arrive 3-5 days.

If you are just travelling using the train and need to carry all your items, don't buy too much because you have to walk a very long path with very high stairs carrying all of those stuff (No elevator). And you only have 15 mins time to walk from train station to train platform.

Advice: Rent a car from Yiwu to Shanghai for example. It's not that expensive. They also have shipping companies to your country, so you can ship your items to your country. It looks risky because it's not UPS or DHL, but it did arrived at my place so their shipping is ok.

Almost all of the sellers don't know how to speak English. It's a must to have a translator.

Yiwu Hotel prices are very cheap and provides nice accommodation. I love the food in the area and it's cheap too! :)

For me, best and fastest way to travel to Yiwu: Shanghai then take train to Yiwu. :)

It was fun! :)

The sheer size is almost unimaginable from the perspective of an individual walking around, if the 4 million sq m listed in the article is accurate. For comparison, that means Yiwu is roughly 400x larger than an average Walmart -- and certainly must be much more densely stocked.

I recently visited Seoul's Dongdaemun shopping area and the scale was shocking. It includes dozens of massive, multi-story buildings that span roughly 10 city blocks. When it was built in 1970, it was the largest such market space in Asia. (They claim it is still the largest, but perhaps the distinction is because Yiwu is considered a city.)

If the average city block is ~10k sq m, then 10 blocks with an average of 4 stories per building yields 400k square meters of space.. which is a mere 10% of Yiwu's claimed size -- wow! You could spend weeks walking around Dongdaemun without seeing everything, but the experience was similar to what the article describes Yiwu as -- booth after booth of the same types of mostly wholesale merchandise.

I actually visited Yiwu to tour a painting factory as part of a China trip to visit artists.

The infamous painting of the rows upon rows of identical paintings and one painter walking down the isles is from a factory in Yiwu. https://www.instapainting.com/blog/company/2015/10/28/how-to...

In Michigan, just North of Flint, we've got the small Bavarian village of Frankenmuth which is a huge tourist draw with lots of handmade German crafts.

http://www.frankenmuth.org/

Just outside town is Bronner's https://www.bronners.com/ which is a superstore dedicated just to Christmas and open every day of the year except Christmas. It's a unique only Michigan attraction, never seen anything like it in my travels across America. I would imagine nowadays most of their merchandise comes from Yiwu.

Many times in my life I've looked around at all the factory manufactured things and have been amazed first at the amount -- that so much of my material life is made in a factory -- and then have wondered, how much of earth is covered in factories? in that, how much does it really require to produce soooooo much, as it is not just around me, but around most of the world's people. It is probably only a small bit of the earth's total land area, but I do wonder.

I live in Yiwu, AMA.

2014. But worth a second look, because nothing much has changed, and because the composition of some of those photos is stunning.

haha. Nice to see my hometown appears in hacker news ;)

Sounds like something from the Twilight Zone.