Every other town in this series makes something. Yiwu sells it. Under one roof, 75,000 booths offer two million kinds of small things to buyers from 210 countries — a habit the city has been practising, one chicken feather at a time, for centuries.
Yiwu is a county-level city in Jinhua, Zhejiang, about an hour from Hangzhou by high-speed train, and its Futian Market — the Yiwu International Trade City — is the largest small-commodities wholesale market on Earth: more than four square kilometres of floor, around 75,000 booths, some two million kinds of product across twenty-six categories, selling to roughly 210 countries. If you own a cheap plastic thing — a hair clip, a keyring, a string of fairy lights — the odds are good it passed through here. Around sixty percent of the world's Christmas decorations come from this one place. And Yiwu itself makes almost none of it.
The trading instinct is very old. Yiwu was founded over two thousand years ago on poor, stony soil that never rewarded farming, so its people traded instead. For centuries, peddlers walked the surrounding countryside shaking a small rattle-drum, swapping homemade brown-sugar sweets and trinkets for chicken feathers — used for fertiliser, dusters and quilts. The practice even had a name: "chicken feathers for sugar" (鸡毛换糖). It was tiny, itinerant, margin-of-survival commerce, and it bred a whole town to think like merchants long before there was anything grand to sell.
That instinct survived even when private trade was banned under the planned economy; Yiwu's peddlers simply kept at it, quietly and illegally. The turn came in 1982, when the county's party secretary, Xie Gaohua, took the political risk of formally opening Yiwu's first small-commodities market — legalising what the town had always done. He was transferred out soon after, but the market only grew: past ten thousand booths by 1991, then explosively after China joined the WTO in 2001, and in 2011 it was made a national trade-pilot city with a bespoke customs regime built for shipping tiny, mixed lots of cheap goods.
What Yiwu became is not a factory town but a distribution brain. The socks of Datang, the umbrellas of Songxia and the output of a thousand other workshops flow here to be sold by the container to buyers from everywhere; thousands of foreign traders live in the city, enough that it has a mosque and an "exotic street", and a published "Yiwu Index" tracks small-commodity prices as a rough barometer of world demand. Then it reached outward: the Yiwu-Madrid freight train, launched in 2014, is one of the longest rail routes in the world, with a Yiwu-London service following in 2017, sending Chinese goods overland to Europe.
Yiwu is the market pattern, the same family as Huaqiangbei — but for the entire physical-goods world rather than electronics, and with the deepest roots of any town here. Huaqiangbei's traders came from Chaoshan; Yiwu's merchant culture is native, centuries old, bred by poor soil. Lay the whole series out and the division of labour is plain: most of these places make one thing (Zheng'an, Songxia, Foshan, Dafen, Datang), a couple were seeded from outside (Dafen, Kunshan), and two are markets that sell what everyone else makes — Huaqiangbei for electronics, Yiwu for everything else. Yiwu is the place where "made in China" quietly turns into "sold to the world".