Christmas is here again. And many households will be decorated as usual. Especially for children, seeing the decorations is the best moment in their lives. And as parents will like to give their best to their children, families, and friends, it means making the holiday season an active one.
However, it may surprise you that all the items used in the decorations to make Christmas lively are not made in the West. They are made far away in somewhere where it is not synonymous with Christmas, the Far East.
Yiwu is a city of about 1.2 million people in central Zhejiang province in China. For years, the city has been nicknamed Christmas Capital of the World. This is because, every year, the many factories in the town produce more than 60 percent of the holiday decorations purchased around the world.
Christmas decorations and accessories ranging from glowing fibre-optic trees to felt Santa hats are made in this city. The city is said to be home to some 750 factories that collectively produce the Christmas accessories.
According to the Take Part, the goods are sold at the sprawling four-million-square-foot International Trade Market with 62,000 booths that receive 40,000 visitors a day. Each booth displays goods from a different factory and sells wholesale to buyers.
The Guardian reports that the market complex of Yiwu has been declared by the United Nations as the Largest Small Commodity wholesale market in the world. The scale of the operation in the city has necessitates a kind of a proper urban planning for the city. Therefore, the city has been organized into five different districts by city authorities.
District Two is where Christmas can be found. When you enter District Two, you will see corridors lined with nothing but tinsel, streets throbbing with competing LED light shows, stockings of every size, plastic Christmas trees in blue and yellow and fluorescent pink, plastic pine cones in gold and silver. There are also sheep in Santa hats and tartan-embroidered reindeer, and of course lots of that inexplicable Chinese staple, Father Christmas playing the saxophone. It is a wonderful city. And for Christmas lovers, it is more than a market or city. It is special place where Christmas joy can be bought.
The BBC’s Tim Maughan after visiting Yiwu wrote that the city has indeed taken the lead when it comes to Christmas decorations, and items needed to make the festive seasons memorable. He also commented on how much factories workers are paid for their labour which is sold almost in every corner of the world.
“China is the global leader in creating plastic junk, and Yiwu market is its showroom. I was never given a definite figure. But I’m told by one of the factory managers that employees here are paid somewhere between $200 and $300 a month to work 12-hour-plus shifts, six days a week”, Maughan said.
You want to support Anonymous Independent & Investigative News? Please, follow us on Twitter: Follow @AnonymousNewsHQ
This Article (The Chinese City Where Christmas Is Made For The Rest Of The World) is free and open source. You have permission to republish this article under a Creative Commons license with attribution to the author and AnonHQ.com
