By Roy Kesey (That's Beijing)
Updated: 2008-02-15 14:32

Like a provincial grab-bag market, fun of shopping in a Free Market is to explore.

I like the Free Market not because its goods are free; as it happens, they cost about the same as similar objects found elsewhere. And it is not because the goods are of higher quality than what you might find in other markets, though neither are they inferior. And it is not because the market is particularly easy to get to. In fact, simply describing how to find it is something of a challenge.

I like the Free Market because it feels simultaneously like a provincial grab-bag market and also like the kind of provincial-grab-bag-feeling market that could only exist in a capital city. Meaning: The whole thing is really quite small, would fit comfortably in a single aisle of any given Carrefour, and yet the goods are incredibly varied. There is a pet section consisting mainly of birds and crickets (and please be aware that here and elsewhere I am using the word “section” in the loosest possible sense; the Free Market is freest in terms of its organizational system, which can best be described as “Oh, Just Put It Wherever”). There is also a vegetable/wet market, with ginger root and apples and peanuts and dried tobacco leaves and fish and tiny crabs. And there is a household-and-leisure goods section, with batteries and hangers and secondhand combs and tools and pipe fittings and secondhand shoes and car parts and belts and fishing lures and portable UV chopstick disinfectant boxes and golf balls and secondhand nudie books, plus one guy selling some kind of magic blue sponge, his speech cadence lifted straight from the Home Shopping Network.

Lastly, there is my favorite part, the Antiques ‘n’ “Antiques” section. This is, I think, where things sufficiently old but too weird for Panjiayuan are sold. Also, you are surely familiar with the gentle age inflation that often occurs in informal markets, wherein Qing objects become Ming, Ming become Yuan, et cetera. Well. A rough survey I took of the vendors at the Free Market showed that nearly all of the objects they sell are of Hongshan origin. I very much hope that this is true, as it would mean that the 30-kuai stone zheng finger-pick I bought is approximately 6,000 years old.

That said, the “Antiques” (as opposed to Antiques) sellers sell everything for ten kuai each, are perfectly happy to inform you that their wares were produced all of yesterday, and here too are splendid oddnesses. You know the little three-monkey See No Evil, Hear No Evil, Speak No Evil statuettes? Allow me to suggest that you come here immediately and buy the four-monkey version, with the fourth monkey holding its crotch.

The Free Market first appeared a year ago, for a few hours each morning, in a stretch of what was then dead space, non-space, void. For the first six months it was repeatedly closed down, the space dead and Undead in equal measure; for the last six months it has been open more or less regularly. Construction goes on all around it, and even under it –as of my last visit, its location, formerly at best a dirt flat, had become a paved roadway, though the road did not yet connect anywhere to anywhere else. And now it is time for news that may or may not be bad. By the time you read this, in all likelihood the road will have been completed, and the market will thus be gone, not forever, just somewhere else, and with luck somewhere easier to find.