A farming town of mulberry groves and fish ponds, with no glass, no wire and no metalworking of its own, makes about 70% of China's lighting and half the world's — grown from two wall lamps a handful of villagers carried back from Hong Kong in 1982.
Tucked into the north-west corner of Zhongshan, in the western Pearl River Delta, Guzhen is a town of barely fifty square kilometres that turns out roughly seventy percent of China's lighting and about half the world's. Forty-five thousand lighting and supporting firms are packed into it; annual output runs past a hundred billion yuan, and the lamps ship to more than a hundred and thirty countries. The improbable part is what Guzhen does not have. It grew no glass, drew no wire, cast no metal, moulded no plastic. It was a mulberry-and-fishpond farming town — and it became the lighting capital of the world anyway.
The beginning is unusually precise. In the early 1980s a Haizhou village man, Yuan Daguang, came back from Hong Kong with a couple of decorative “foreign lamps” — one account puts it at eighty Hong Kong dollars for two wall lamps. The things were simple: a lamp head in the middle, a few glass side-pieces, nothing a determined farmer could not copy. With Yuan Yuman and the farmer-brothers Hou Ruiyuan, Yuan Guangming and Qu Weisong, he took them apart and worked out how to rebuild them. In October 1982, after two-plus months of trial and error, five households produced Guzhen's first batch of home-made wall lamps — close to a thousand of them, at a gross margin of more than fifty percent a lamp.
Why here, in a place with no light industry at all? Because of where it sat. Guzhen lies at the meeting point of three areas — Zhongshan, Jiangmen and Shunde — that were already strong in exactly the parts a lamp needs. The founders found plastic lamp-bases in nearby Xiaolan, screws at a small workshop in Foshan's Zhangcha, and the tea-coloured glass they wanted at a glass-craft factory in Zhongshan after hunting through Guangzhou and Jiangmen. Guzhen's own contribution was assembly, design and selling: it stitched its neighbours' light-industrial output into a finished, saleable lamp. That crossroads, more than any single founder, is the whole explanation.
From there it compounded fast. By 1986 there were already several hundred lighting firms; in 1995 the local government formally named lighting the town's pillar industry, and by 1997 Guzhen lamps held nearly half the national market. The trade hardened along one road into the celebrated “ten-li lighting street”, then — from 1998 — shifted from copying to designing, refreshing its styles every few months. The first international lighting fair came in 1999; in November 2002 the town was crowned “China's Lighting Capital”. After 2006 the roadside shops were rebuilt into giant professional malls anchored by Times Square, joined later by Star Alliance, Huayi Plaza and the vast Lihe Plaza. The twice-yearly Guzhen International Lighting Fair now pulls in well over two thousand foreign buyers from more than a hundred countries.
Set beside the other deep dives, Guzhen is its own species. Dafen was transplanted whole by a single dealer; Datang grew its socks from farmers knitting in secret on their own land; Huaqiangbei is a market, not a maker. Guzhen is the assembler at a crossroads — a town with no inputs of its own that turned a lucky position between three industrial neighbours into most of a national industry. Its strength and its limit are the same sentence: it owns the assembly, the design and the trading floor, but the components were always somebody else's. The current pivot — LED and smart lighting, real brands, exports aimed at the Middle East, South-East Asia, Africa and South America, livestream selling — is the long move from copying a lamp to owning the design of one.