Shantou, one of China's first Special Economic Zones, makes two things the world buys by the container: toys and underwear. Its Chenghai district is the country's toy capital, behind the local boast that most of the world's toys come from China, most of China's from Guangdong, and most of Guangdong's from Chenghai. Next door, Gurao town is China's largest maker of cheap underwear.
Shantou, on the eastern Guangdong coast, was made one of China's original Special Economic Zones in 1980. Its Chenghai district is the only place titled “China Toys and Gifts City,” home to more than 4,000 toy, gift and animation makers (by some counts far more) and a complete chain from design and mould-making to injection, printing, packaging and trade. Chenghai toys reach more than 140 countries, behind the local saying that most of the world's toys come from China, most of China's from Guangdong, and most of Guangdong's from here.
Fifty kilometres away, in Shantou's Chaoyang district, Gurao town is the largest underwear town in China: more than 3,000 firms, with the surrounding Chaoyang and Chaonan districts forming what the trade calls the country's underwear capital. Bras above all, plus knitwear and loungewear, sold to forty-plus countries. The chain is complete down to the lace, elastic and sponge; locals say you need only bring the cotton and you can make underwear.
The two trades share a logic. Both are cheap, high-volume, fast-turnover consumer goods made by dense swarms of small family workshops and sold through trader networks and the Canton Fair rather than by the makers directly; in Chenghai, most of the “factories” a foreign buyer finds online are in fact traders. This is the Chaoshan model: thousands of tiny firms, one product each, a complete local supply chain, and a layer of middlemen between the workshop and the world.
Shantou's edge is its diaspora and its trading culture. Goods move through exhibition halls and showrooms, the Chenghai toy showroom chief among them, where the region's output is displayed for agents who handle sourcing, negotiation, inspection and shipping. It is a place organised less around any single famous factory than around the dense market that connects a thousand of them to the buyer.
Shantou is one corner of a tight triangle with Chaozhou (porcelain and gowns) and Jieyang (stainless steel): three small cities within about fifty kilometres, sharing one airport, each a global niche capital. It is a regional constellation rather than a single axis, five world-class trades inside one small, distinct corner of Guangdong.