Country Driving [144]
Another ten miles down Highway 330, past another bend in the river, the town of Qiaotou had erected a statue of a button. It was a huge disk of silver, ten feet wide and topped by wings that spun whenever the wind came up. Qiaotou’s population was only 64,000, but the town had 380 factories that manufactured more than 70 percent of the buttons for clothes made in China. In honor of this status, the village elders erected the statue in the center of town, right in front of a new building called “Button City.” Button City was four stories tall, and the ground-floor market was dedicated entirely to Qiaotou’s distinctive product. Clothes manufacturers arrived to buy in bulk, and sellers organized their wares by size and style. Former peasants hawked buttons out of grain sacks—big twenty-five-pound bags, still labeled “Rice” and “Flour,” now filled with nothing but buttons.
On the day I drove through, many dealers were women with small children, and the kids sat on the cement floor. Whenever they began to cry, somebody tossed them another handful of buttons to play with. I could only imagine how much of Button City was being processed by tiny intestines on a daily basis, and it occurred to me that with a little organization, these kids could be shipped out to Xiaxie every morning to play on the jungle gyms. But there was no overlap between the towns, and moving from one to the other, at least in the economic sense, was almost as absolute as crossing an international border. People told me that even the local dialects were essentially unintelligible.
This part of Zhejiang is famous for difficult dialects, and it’s also full of one-product towns. Locals tend to specialize in some simple object, in part because they have little formal training and it’s easiest to manufacture something that doesn’t require much technology and investment. Whenever Highway 330 led me to a place of decent size, I pulled over and asked a bystander, “What do people make here?” Usually they could answer the question in a sentence; sometimes they didn’t need to say a word. In the town of Wuyi, a man responded by reaching into his pocket and pulling out a handful of playing cards. I subsequently learned that Wuyi manufactures one billion decks a year: half of China’s domestic market. Fifty miles away, Yiwu makes one quarter of the world’s plastic drinking straws. A place called Yongkang produces 95 percent of Chinese scales. In another part of Zhejiang, Songxia turns out 350 million umbrellas every year. Fenshui specializes in pens; Shangguan manufactures table tennis paddles. Datang produces one-third of the socks on earth. Forty percent of the world’s neckties are made in a place called Shengzhou.
Between factory towns I drove through countryside of remarkable beauty. Sometimes the Ou River narrowed, bordered by big cliffs of stone, and the valley deepened into a gorge. Highway 330 follows the river upstream, into the provincial highlands, and with every mile the mountains become more impressive. Unlike northern China, these areas receive heavy rainfall and there’s a lushness to the landscape. And after a couple of days I began to enjoy the journey’s contrasts: the stunning scenery and the odd products, the way the landscape expanded to vistas of rivers and mountains, and then suddenly narrowed into a town that made something tiny: cards, pens, straws.
In the evenings I usually stayed at the International Hotel. Many factory towns had a guesthouse with that name, to serve the foreign buyers and managers who occasionally passed through. In the lobby they displayed flyers from local companies; sometimes, if there was a factory that made something more elaborate than a button or a straw, they featured a high-end model in the room. In the city of Yongkang, famous for scales and electrical tools, my room contained something called the Human Body Ingredient