Inside the ‘Christmas village’ of Yiwu, there’s no snow and no elves, just 600 factories that produce 60% of all the decorations in the world
Oliver Wainwright
THE GUARDIAN - Friday 19 December 2014
There’s red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from
the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks
like the artist Anish Kapoor
has been let loose with his wax cannon again. But this, in fact, is
what the making of Christmas looks like; this is the very heart of the
real Santa’s workshop – thousands of miles from the North Pole, in the
Chinese city of Yiwu.
Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas
is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin
somewhere in the Arctic Circle. But it’s not. The likelihood is that
most of those baubles, tinsel and flashing LED lights you’ve draped
liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 300km south of Shanghai –
where there’s not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight.
READ MORE....
No comments:
Post a Comment