A town of under 50 square kilometres in Zhuji that grows and trades roughly 70% of the world's freshwater pearls — turning a lake-bottom mollusc into a multi-billion-dollar global jewellery business, now sold mostly by livestream from the stall.
Shanxiahu means, literally, "the lake below the mountain." It is a town in the northeast of Zhuji, in Zhejiang, covering less than 50 square kilometres of former rice and fish country. From that small footprint comes the great majority of the world's freshwater pearls: about 80% of China's output and 70% of the world's, traded through what is now the largest freshwater-pearl market on Earth.
In the 1970s, Shanxiahu's farmers sold raw pearls from stalls by the road, and buyers travelled long distances to pick through them. Today a single phone reaches the whole world. The China Pearls & Jewellery International City, opened in 2008, gathers transactions, brand display and authentication under one roof, and at dusk the stallholders pull down the shutters, switch on the beauty lights and ring lamps, and begin the "golden hours" of livestream selling.
For decades Chinese freshwater pearls were the cheap cousin: small, irregular, off-round. Then Zhuji's growers cracked the hard problems. The large, round, intensely lustrous Edison pearl, cultivated here in a wide range of natural colours, narrowed the gap with saltwater pearls so far that freshwater now competes at the top of the market. It was a technical achievement in mollusc farming as much as a commercial one.
Between 60 and 70% of the market's sales now happen online, across platforms like Taobao and Douyin, with cross-border e-commerce growing fast. It is a strange product to sell on camera: a small pearl can differ a hundredfold in price between a synthetic bead and a fine cultured gem, and ordinary buyers cannot tell them apart, which makes the market's authentication services as important as the pearls themselves.
Zhuji is, by legend, the birthplace of Xi Shi, the most famous beauty of ancient China, which gives the pearl trade a ready-made myth. The brand "Shanxiahu pearls" is now valued in the tens of billions of yuan, and the town's stated ambition is to stop being merely the world's pearl farm and become its pearl showroom.