On the southwest Guangdong coast, Yangjiang has made blades for 1,400 years. Today it turns out about three-quarters of China's knives and scissors and eight of every ten that China exports, an industry worth over ¥55 billion, from ¥10 cleavers to premium pocket knives ground from imported steel.
Yangjiang sits on the southwest Guangdong coast, just beyond the Pearl River Delta. It has been China's “Capital of Knives and Scissors” by formal title since 2001, and the numbers behind the title are large: by official figures it makes about 70 to 75% of China's knives and scissors and 85% of the country's blade exports, an industrial cluster worth more than 55 billion yuan. Some 2,000 knife and scissor makers, inside a wider web of 8,500 related firms, employ around 200,000 people and turn out over 5,000 kinds of product sold to 130-odd countries. Eight of every ten knives China exports are ground here.
The craft is old. Blade-making in Yangjiang is traced to around 557 AD, when the local heroine Lady Xian garrisoned troops here and the forging of weapons began; by the nineteenth century American missionaries were carrying Yangjiang knives home as gifts. The modern anchor is Shibazi, founded in 1983 and now China's leading kitchen-knife brand, a family firm whose founder is the recognised inheritor of the “Yangjiang knife” intangible heritage. Heritage names from elsewhere, Zhang Xiaoquan (founded 1628) and Wang Mazi, now do much of their manufacturing in Yangjiang too.
Most of what Yangjiang makes is still cheap household cutlery, a kitchen knife that sells for ten or twenty dollars abroad, and the makers know the danger of that. “We will be easily replaced if we don't improve and build national brands like Japan and Germany,” one Shibazi executive put it. So the climb is on: premium steels (S35VN, M390, VG-10), CNC grinding and vacuum heat-treatment, and a striking new wave of everyday-carry and tactical knife brands, CIVIVI, WE Knife, Kizer, selling to collectors worldwide. China makes just over half of all knives traded on Earth, and Yangjiang is most of China's share.
What holds it together is a complete local chain: special steel, plastics and rubber for handles, precision molds, grinding and heat-treat machinery, all within reach, plus the annual China (Yangjiang) International Hardware Knives and Scissors Fair, running since 2002, and a permanent “Cutlery City” trade hall. It is a self-contained blade ecosystem of the kind this atlas keeps finding, kin to Jieyang's stainless-steel hardware and Yongkang's tool town a few provinces north.