Rise of China's small goods giant captured on celluloid
Editor’s note: With photographs captured through the decades, China Daily is presenting a series of visual chronicles to showcase how different fields evolved under the tide of China’s reform and opening-up, and how that tide changed people’s lives.
In the early years of China's reform and opening-up, Yiwu, a small county-level city in Zhejiang province, was a resource-scarce land with a fragile economy. Its earliest pioneers shouldered wooden cases filled with candy, walking from village to village to trade sweets for chicken feathers. It was a humble, painstaking livelihood, barely enough to make ends meet.
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As the tide of the era shifted, so did Yiwu's fate. What began as a modest open-air street market at Huqingmen — where vendors laid out their wares on the bare ground — soon laid the groundwork for a burgeoning small-commodity trade market.
From crude sheds and makeshift stalls, the market expanded through successive waves of modernization, ultimately evolving into the world-renowned Yiwu International Trade City. Over four decades, the market's architecture, trading methods and merchant community transformed beyond recognition — a process of continuous reinvention that continues to this day.
This grassroots transformation — a county-level economic miracle — was systematically documented and preserved by local photographer Jin Fugen. For more than 40 years, his lens tracked the daily lives of countless ordinary merchants as they set up stalls, prepared goods, met buyers, negotiated orders, packed and shipped their goods.
Through these micro-interactions, Jin captured the macro-narrative of Yiwu's rise from a local market to a global trade network. Decades of light and shadow live in his archives. Beyond preserving the hard work, adaptability and perseverance of generations of local entrepreneurs, these documentary photographs stand as a vivid record of China's broader private sector development, capturing a single city's journey into the global marketplace.
Through the commercial evolution of one small city, they bear witness to the nation's opening-up and its embrace of the global market.
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From chicken feathers to world trade, from roadside stalls to the world's supermarket — Yiwu's trajectory is a story of building something from nothing and turning raw grit into economic momentum.
In the quiet frames of Jin's photographs, that history remains strikingly dynamic.
