Economy

Tiny village becomes hub

By Xu Junqian (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-11-01 10:55

An employee delivers commodities at a warehouse of a Taobao.com store in Qingyanliu village, Zhejiang province. [Photo / China Daily]

Taobao changed residents' lives to a focus on online business and getting rich. Xu Junqian found out how they run stores in Qingyanliu, Zhejiang province.

It is a few minutes to 4:00 pm at Qingyanliu, a small village tucked away in Yiwu, Zhejiang province, and it is so quiet you can almost hear a pin drop. Few people can be seen walking around. Rooms on the first floor of every building are tightly shuttered. The entire village is so quiet and empty, it appears to have been evacuated. The one innocuous sight is the number of luxury cars parked in the streets.

However, behind the iron gates of almost every residence in the village, narrow staircases lead to a totally different world consisting of thousands of 300 square meter underground warehouses.

This is "Taobao village", as it has become known, and it is famous for its billion yuan annual sales volume on taobao.com, China's largest online shopping bazaar.

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Illuminated brightly by hundreds of fluorescent lights, the underground space is a world buzzing with activity. Lines of shelves groaning with boxes of goods take up more than half of the basement.

Workers busily shuttle through, picking up goods according to the printed orders in their hands and passing them to other workers who sit on stools immersed in packing.

The floor is piled with so many paper boxes of different sizes that one can barely set foot in. The sound of tape being ripped mingles with shouted demands. The stuffy air is ripe with the smell of perspiration. Lunch box leftovers litter what little space remains.

At the stroke of 4:00 pm, the whole village seems to wake up and spring into action, as if by order of an invisible magic hand.

The small gates that separate the underground world from the outside are all opened. Wrapped boxes come pouring out.

Trucks and vans crowd into the village one after another and park by the gates, waiting to be filled up. The underground workers emerge and begin bustling about with the freight.

"This is the everyday routine of the village. People's lives here are centered around the business schedule of Taobao," said Liu Wengao, secretary-general of the local e-commerce association, which was voluntarily founded by some online business dealers in the village in April.

"They get up at noon, begin taking orders from all around the country, then express deliveries come to pick up the goods at dusk. Dealers continue their business late into the night," Liu added.