Puyuan was a silk town for eight hundred years. Today it is the largest sweater market on Earth: by local accounts seven of every ten sweaters in the world pass through it, around 700 million a year, with a market turnover near ¥130 billion. Like its rival Dalang, it raises no sheep and spins no wool of its own.
Puyuan, a town in Tongxiang near Jiaxing, is the largest sweater distribution centre in the world. By the figures local officials and state media cite, as many as seven of every ten sweaters on Earth pass through its market, it holds something like 70% of China's wool-sweater trade, and around 700 million sweaters are sold through it a year, with a 2023 market turnover of about 130 billion yuan. Some 5,000 sweater firms sit inside a 60-square-kilometre town, employing roughly 200,000 people. The local boast is blunt: for every three people in China, two own a sweater that came through Puyuan.
Puyuan earned the right to the claim slowly. It was a celebrated silk town under the Ming and Qing, known for “Pu silk,” and one of the storied “five famous towns” of the Jiangnan water country; the silk weave is now listed intangible heritage. The modern sweater trade began in 1988 with a government-organised market, grown from a handful of hand-cranked flat-knitting machines in the 1970s. The same irony that hangs over Dalang hangs here: Tongxiang grows no wool, yet became the country's great wool-sweater town.
Puyuan and Dalang split the country's sweaters between them, and the split is telling. Where Dongguan's Dalang built its billion sweaters on cheap export processing, Puyuan is the branded, domestic and cashmere end, high-grade yarns, design houses, its own labels. It hosted the International Wool Textile Organisation's world congress in 2022 and staged a New York Fashion Week event in 2024, and it is pushing a “pan-fashion” strategy, Puyuan Fashion Week and the “Puyuan Fashion” brand, to climb from being a market into being a name.
Puyuan is one corner of a second garment triangle, this one in the old Hang-Jia-Hu silk plain of northern Zhejiang: within about forty kilometres lie Haining, China's leather and fur capital, and Zhili, the town that clothes China's children. Where the Pearl River Delta's denim-and-knit triangle was built by migrants in a single generation, this one is the ancient silk heartland reinvented. Cross-links below.