Is there a sex-toy town? Not quite: the toys themselves are spread across three provinces. But the lingerie has a single, unlikely capital. Guanyun, a poor farming county in northern Jiangsu, makes by local accounts about half the world's erotic lingerie and three in five of the pieces sold online in China, sewn largely by village women in houses you would never look at twice.
The short answer is no, not one. China makes something like 70% of the world's sex toys, by some estimates more, but the production has no single capital: it splits across Guangdong, where Shenzhen and Dongguan make the higher-end silicone and electronic devices, and Zhejiang, where Yiwu's giant wholesale market and towns like Wenzhou and Taizhou turn out cheap volume. The one product in the whole adult-goods world that does have a clean, single-county monopoly is lingerie, and it is made in the last place you would guess.
Guanyun, in the flat farm country of northern Jiangsu, has just under a million people and was long one of the poorest counties in the province. Today it is sometimes called the Eastern Victoria's Secret. By local accounts it makes around half the world's erotic lingerie; more soberly, reputable reporting puts it at about three in five of the pieces sold online in China, made by 500-plus manufacturers (over a thousand by the county's own newer count) and more than 20,000 workers, with combined sales now running into the billions of yuan. Most of it is sewn in Dongwangji, a town that looks like any other on the road, all farmland and dust, betrayed only by the factory hiring boards.
The whole thing traces to one person. In 2006 a local teenager, Lei Congrui, helped his mother open a Taobao shop after her children's-clothing store failed, selling odds and ends, cosmetics, slippers, cheap lingerie. Lingerie sold best, and when he suspected his Guangdong suppliers were shipping him junk, he started making his own. He opened his factory, “Midnight Charm,” in 2009 at seventeen, while still a law student; he had told classmates he wanted a million yuan before twenty-five and hit it in his first year of university. His success ripped through the county, relatives first, then neighbours, then strangers, until lingerie was the local economy.
The strangest thing about Guanyun is who makes the lingerie. In a conservative rural county, the workforce is largely farm women who sew between harvests, paid a yuan or two a piece, a few thousand a month, good money here and enough to draw migrants home. The taboo was real: early factories recruited under the cover of being ordinary “garment factories,” workers quit when they saw the product, and many still tell relatives they just “make clothes.” The bosses, meanwhile, read the world's desires like a weather map: bright colours for Africa, flashy cuts for America, restraint for Europe, cute for Asia. Same lace, sorted by hemisphere.
Guanyun is now doing what every town in this atlas eventually tries: climbing from anonymous volume toward a brand, and cleaning up its image on the way. The county once had no idea how to promote a “specialty” industry it could barely name; since 2021 it has had an official development plan, a purpose-built “Victoria's Secret Town” industrial park, and a careful new label, “light themed apparel,” that never says the word. Some firms are pushing the product toward ordinary fashion and loungewear, blurring the line with regular underwear, while others chase overseas warehouses to survive new US tariffs. The ambition, stated plainly by the people here, is a homegrown Victoria's Secret, grown out of a Jiangsu cornfield.