Inside the adjoining Erbil restaurant, two Jordanian men share a plate heaped with barbecued meat and vegetables, while on the street corner two men sit smoking shisha pipes. The Zekeen supermarket sells both instant noodles and halal meat, and an African woman wearing a hijab carries out bags of shopping. Opposite, two young Russian women emerge from a shop that sells the unlikely combination of trainers and sex toys.
This mix of communities, religions and languages has augmented Yiwu’s reputation as one of China’s most multicultural cities; a risk-taking new frontier drawing fortune hunters from across the world. As Mark Jacobs puts it in his book Yiwu, China: A Study of the World’s Largest Small Commodities Market, “anything can be had for a dollar or a yuan”.
The reason they come here is simple. Yiwu boasts a breathtaking emporium covering 5.5 million sq metres with more than 75,000 shops and stalls. This is the supplier of stuff for discount stores the world over: fake flowers, coloured beads, hair ties, inflatable toys, tinsel, party hats, umbrellas – Yiwu is the source of more than 1.8m products, including 70% of all of the world’s Christmas decorations. [...]
Keenly aware a market needs a steady flow of buyers, the government has been pushing the message that all foreigners are welcome. Signs at the train station are in Chinese, English and Arabic, the government publishes a weekly newspaper in English, recently opened the city’s first international school, and is considering teaching Arabic in public schools, given the large number of traders from the Middle East and North Africa.
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