Yiwu International Trade City

One of the 'Streets' on the cosmetics floor. jacksonhotaling (Atlas Obscura User)

The Yiwu International Trade City hosts 70,000 wholesale commodity market with more than 200,000 employees.

Yiwu in Zhejiang Province, China has always been a home to trade, where peasants traded chicken feathers back in the 1600s. Now, home to the world’s largest commodity market, trade extends as far as Yiwu’s direct train line of 13,000 km to Madrid, Spain. This is an overwhelmingly massive building that is the best place to see how China ships inexpensive products wholesale to the rest of the world.

Across five districts with connecting air bridges, this commodity market allows customers from virtually every country to purchase wholesale products and prepare for shipping. Each section of each district hosts different commodities, with entire floors of the districts devoted to the products of such industries as “toys and artificial flowers,” “socks,” and “bags and cases, umbrellas and rainware, and plastic bags, package bags, and shopping bags.”

It will be a challenge not to get lost, so there are easily accessible maps across the narrow alleyways of the districts, with restaurants inside for those who get hungry after kilometers of walking inside the buildings.