Green, sleepy and longing for the city

A resident of Jinfu village in Yiwu. Photos By Feng Yongbin / China Daily

Away from the hectic dealings of Yiwu's urban markets, Satarupa Bhattacharjya comes across a contrasting picture in its villages

Yiwu is among the nearly 1,500 counties on the Chinese mainland, and given that the city feeds much of global demand for items of daily use, it may be one of the busiest counties in the world.

Famous with in China and abroad, it is apart of the larger and relatively unknown Jinhua prefecture in eastern Zhejiang province, an administrative fact few visitors care about. Yiwu is classed as a tier-three city by Chinese standard, but with its vast swathes of wholesale outlets it is urbanizing at a steady pace.

Thirty years ago, the city, now a world hub of small commodity trade covering more than 100 square kilometers of floor space, was a single-digit plot of farmland with an adjacent open market. But now elderly people and children largely inhabit its shrinking rural patches that are green and sleepy.

Hills and some signs of development surround the outskirts of Yiwu city. The main road leading to the area passes through a short tunnel, crossing fields on which the local farmers grow vegetables, and gradually narrows before disappearing into a mud track.

The setting, amid a spattering of ponds that sprout lotuses and water lilies, is in sharp contrast to the high-octane dealings of the international marketplace not far away.

As a morning drizzle recedes from Jinfu village, an elderly couple is seen drying fish over a netted stand, under which burning leaves and sawdust generate the heat. Chinese pop music is heard belting out from their neighbor's house, but that does not seem to distract passersby in farmer's hats who greet the couple.

The village takes its name from Jin and Fu, the location's two prominent surnames.

Here, of the 1,400 resident families, some 700 people are older than 55 - the average official retirement age in China. Most of the others work in the city's many markets. There are 30,000 factories around Yiwu, which produce day-to-day necessities and employ thousands of city and village dwellers.