Merchants of yiwu

How foreign traders live life in the heart of 'made in China'

On a weekday night downtown, a young woman in a pink off-shoulder dress emerges from the opening in a car roof, jiving to music. The dark convertible, with her male companion at the wheel, zips through the street as traffic lights change. From a distance, her wind-blown hair and bobbing thin frame make her look like a character from a video game.

The scene unfolds in Yiwu, a nondescript county-level city in East China's Zhejiang province, far removed from any world capital of fashion or entertainment. But it is from here that merchants from about 220 countries, including war-torn Syria, buy their daily necessities.