Picture your favourite pair of jeans. If you bought them outside China there is roughly a one-in-three chance they were made in Xintang, an industrial town east of Guangzhou that turns out about 300 million pairs a year and around two-thirds of China's denim. It is the denim capital of the world, and it has paid for the title in blue water.
Xintang, in Guangzhou's Zengcheng district, is the denim capital of the world. About one in three pairs of jeans sold anywhere is made here, roughly 60% of all China's denim, and something like one in two of the jeans bought inside China. The town turns out on the order of 300 million pairs a year across some 3,000 to 4,000 jeans businesses, with around 1,200 denim-specialised factories, 200,000-plus workers and over a thousand brands packed into about 40 square kilometres. Levi's, Wrangler, Uniqlo, Gap, H&M and Zara have all sourced here; some of the work migrated from El Paso, Texas, in the 1970s and 80s.
What Xintang really owns is the complete chain. Built up since the 1980s, it spins, dyes, weaves, finishes, prints, cuts, washes, sews and packs, all within the same dense few kilometres, which is why a buyer can get samples in three washes and a finished run in under a month. The wash is the secret: the faded, distressed, stonewashed looks that decide whether a jean reads cheap or premium come from chemical-intensive washing, a single pair sometimes run through the machines up to twenty times. Apart from the cotton and the cut, a pair of jeans mostly is its wash.
That wash is also the wound. Denim dyeing and washing made Xintang one of the most notorious pollution stories in Chinese manufacturing: a tributary of the East River, drinking water for millions in Guangzhou, ran indigo, and a local saying held that the town was “so polluted you can't give the houses away.” In 2010 Greenpeace measured river-mud cadmium at 128 times the national limit and water at a pH near 12; by one estimate a single pair of jeans can take some 960 gallons of water. Labour and pollution tensions boiled over into riots in 2011. The government has since pushed the washing and dyeing into walled “environmental industrial parks,” the same hard turn this atlas traces at Guiyu's e-waste yards; Greenpeace named Xintang in the same 2010 report as Gurao, the bra town also in this atlas.
Xintang is one corner of a tight Pearl River Delta garment triangle: a half-hour east lie Dalang, which makes one in five of the world's sweaters, and Humen, the fashion-market town where the First Opium War began. Between the three of them, most of a wardrobe is made inside a single half-hour's drive. The climb for Xintang itself is the now-familiar one, from anonymous cheap denim toward its own brands, a planned “world jeans distribution centre,” cleaner water and more automation.