China’s largest commodities center in Yiwu

Yiwu, a city located in the center of Zhejiang Province some 300 kilometers from Shanghai and 130 kilometers from Hangzhou, is the largest commodities market in China.

The residents’ ability to do business, inherited from their ancestors who earned money several thousand years ago by exchanging sugar for other goods, yielded fruit with the start of the politics of reforms and opening up in China. Thus Yiwu won the title of not only the world’s largest commodities market but also of a large manufacturer of this category of the goods.

Today the area of the city’s main shopping center where one can buy zippers, socks, lighters, clothes and other things occupies 4 million square meters.

For the years of its development Yiwu, which started being called a city only in 1988, gained the glory of the large industrial center.

It houses, for example, the world's largest factory manufacturing zippers: A factory manufacturing 1.5 million pairs of socks a day is also located here.

Yiwu citizens say that if one spends an 8-hour working day by stopping only for three minutes at each of 62,300 pavilions of the complex he will need more than a year to finish the sightseeing tour.

The goods, most of which are made directly here, in Yiwu, as a result go to the counters of shops and markets of Europe, the United States and Russia.

The building of the market.

The magnets for refrigerator, loved by tourists, are produced here and one can buy here a gift from St. Petersburg and Barcelona.

This place will make happy the collectors of sailing ship models. In Yiwu one will have everything ready for a trip to any corner of the world.

Yiwu sells everything, including Italian carnival masks.

The Christmas and New year season has already begun in the shopping center of the Chinese city of Yiwu. Festive goods are now on sale at almost each of the 60,000 counters.