Impressions of Yiwu

I have long heard that Yiwu’s trade is developed and tops the world, and yesterday I had the opportunity to experience it on the spot. Yiwu is just a county-level city under Jinhua City, Zhejiang Province. Yiwu is located in the middle of Zhejiang Province. Its geographical location is not superior, and its resources are also scarce. It is typical of “seven mountains, two waters and one field”. In the 1980s, Yiwu people carried goods baskets, shook rattle drums, walked through the streets and alleys, and did the business of “chicken feathers for sugar” (bartering). After more than forty years of development, it has become the world’s largest small commodity wholesale market. Nowadays, walking on the streets of Yiwu, high-rise buildings can be seen everywhere, and high-end hotels such as Shangri-La and Hilton are abundant. On the busy roads, BBA (BMW, Benz, Audi) are just standard, and many Western faces can be seen inside the car windows. Looking at the prosperity of the market, it is more classy than Shanghai Shikumen. Everything is supported by the developed local trade.

Yiwu Small Commodity City is the largest local trade market, consisting of seven professional markets: International Trade District (District 1 to 5), International Trade City Production Materials Market, and Huangyuan Market. Huangyuan Market is a professional clothing wholesale market with an area of 420,000 square meters. All six floors are densely packed with stalls. Large shops are hundreds of square meters, and small ones are twenty or thirty square meters. There are almost no idle stalls, and the occupancy rate is at least 99%. The quality and grade of most clothes are not worse than fast fashion brands such as Uniqlo, and even much better than the quality of clothes in ZARA physical stores. Due to the epidemic and e-commerce transformation, the flow of people on the spot was not large. There were scattered merchants in the market to select products, and the rest were mostly operators. There were at most seven or eight people in each stall, and at least two or three people, mostly busy with live streaming e-commerce.

Seven or eight kilometers away from Huangyuan is District 2 of Yiwu Small Commodity City. The entire building has five floors with more than 600,000 square meters, specializing in bags, hardware tools, kitchen utensils, telecommunications equipment, instruments, small home appliances, etc. It takes twenty minutes to walk from beginning to end on each floor, and the scale is huge. Like Huangyuan, the occupancy rate here is also very high, and there are basically no idle shops. The difference is that Huangyuan merchants are mostly family-based wholesalers, while District 2 here is the exhibition and sales center of manufacturers, and the shop area and decoration are more modern and grand. Huangyuan merchants are mainly Chinese, while District 2 here is mainly foreigners. Overseas buyers carrying backpacks can be seen everywhere selecting products and discussing cooperation. Some shops even hire foreigners as sales staff to dock with overseas merchants, and some shop owners use social software to display products to overseas customers and negotiate cooperation.

The current situation and root causes of Yiwu’s trade development can be summarized in three pictures: The first one is a display of a shop, where not a single Chinese outer package can be seen on the shelves full of goods, all of which are goods for export to overseas. The domain name of Yiwu market www.chinagoods.com accurately interprets the positioning of the market.

The second one is the sign of “Premier’s Visit Route” on the third floor of District 2, which reads Premier Li’s summary of the current situation of Yiwu trade: Your shop area is not large, but what you expand is the global market; although the geographical location is not unique, logistics leads to almost every corner of the world.

The third one is the Yiwu spirit in a corridor: Diligent and eager to learn, upright and brave, honest and inclusive.

Published at: Jan 16, 2021 · Modified at: Dec 2, 2025