Yongkang does not make one thing — it makes nearly everything metal. This central Zhejiang city is at once China's capital of hardware, doors, cups, power tools, cookware and scooters. It turns out about 150,000 scooters a day, more than anywhere on Earth, on top of a metalworking tradition seventeen centuries deep.
Most towns in this atlas corner a single product. Yongkang corners a whole material. This central Zhejiang city of about a million people calls itself "seven capitals, one city" — China's capital of hardware, of doors, of cups, of power tools, of cookware, of recreational scooters, of household cleaning goods — because it dominates all of them at once. Some 40,000 registered firms and more than 400,000 hardware workers turn out roughly a hundred billion yuan of metal goods a year. The daily tallies tell it best: around 150,000 scooters a day, the most in the world, and some 30,000 security doors.
Yongkang was founded in 245 AD and named "eternal well-being" — yong kang — for the recovery of a king's mother who had come to pray for her health. It has been a metalworking town for almost all of the seventeen centuries since, known as the "home of a hundred crafts": sword-smithing in the Spring and Autumn era, crossbows under the Han, bronze guns in the Tang. Few clusters in the atlas reach back so far. The local saying captures it: Yongkang's artisans go everywhere, and wherever metal needs working, you will find a Yongkang hand.
The origin here is not a founder or a transplanted factory but a habit of movement. For generations Yongkang's metalworkers were itinerant — fanning out across China to mend pots, cast tools, forge and sharpen blades, then returning home with the money and the orders. When reform opened the economy, the tinkers' descendants did the obvious thing: they stopped travelling and built workshops, turning roadside repair into industrial manufacturing. The skill had always been mobile; it simply settled down and scaled up.
The range is the whole point. Yongkang makes roughly 90% of China's cups — over 200 million a year — and about 70% of its security and fire doors, with eight of the country's top ten door brands; a third of China's power tools, about half its stainless-steel tableware, and some 45% of its household scales, plus cookware, electric scooters, fitness gear and smart locks. Two vast wholesale markets, Jincheng and Jindu, and the China Hardware Fair, running since 1996, aggregate the lot — so a buyer can stock an entire hardware store from this one town.
There is a neat rhyme in it. A city named "eternal well-being," for a recovery, whose single largest industry is the anti-theft door and whose next is health cookware — Yongkang still, in its way, keeps people safe and well. Set beside the other deep dives, it is the atlas's generalist: not a one-product town but a hundred-product one, resting on the oldest metalworking culture in the country, now climbing from cheap hardware up toward power tools, electric vehicles and smart devices.