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The Sun Yat Sen fabric market is not exactly a place where you leisurely browse to find nice fabrics for your home sewing. Rather it’s a sprawl of gigantic buildings filled with booths each selling its specific product. Booths dedicated to eyelets, to zippers, to lace, to ribbons. To appliqués, to trimmings for sleeves and collars, to sequins, to laces, to needles, to clasps, to buckles, to glass buttons, to plastic buttons, to wooden buttons, to metal buttons, to elastic, not to mention to a huge variety of fabrics. The sheer volume of stuff is almost upsetting. It’s too much for my senses to handle. My brain shuts down in a panic. Not only is the amount of goods hard to deal with, also the flow of traffic inbetween takes place at a manic pace. Cyclists and tri-cyclists, laden with rolls of fabric, weave through the pedestrian traffic, their load sticking out, miraculously not knocking anybody off their feet. At a zebra crossing, traffic wardens blow their whistles incessantly, trying to stop cars, pedestrians, cyclists, carts from ignoring the red light. The sound of their whistles is just one soundtrack. On top of that is the constant honking of horns, yells of cyclists letting everyone know they’re coming through (no matter what), bicycle bells ringing, and let’s not forget the guys carting around large speakers blasting some popular Chinese music in order to sell CDs. This soundscape, combined with the complete anarchy within the traffic flow make for a pretty intense experience.

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The art of piling and balancing boxes is taken to great heights here on Jiefang Lu in the vicinity of Metropolis Shoe City. And not only here, but around many commercial areas in Guangzhou, I’ve witnessed amazing towers of boxes piled meters high, either on the back of bicycles, or on small trolleys. The main, flabbergasting, mindboggling, incredible feature is that very often, the boxes aren’t tied together in any way. Nor are they attached to the vehicles of transportation. They’re simply arranged, loosely, one on top of the other. Presumbly their weight is enough to keep them aligned and in balance. On occasion, I’ve seen towers of boxes almost 3 meters high being negotiated through busy traffic on the back of a bike. Inevitably, every now and then a tower collapses…but mostly the young men, mostly boys, manage to weave effortlessly through the pedestrian crowds to deliver their packages safely. I watch and marvel.

What I had encountered was a giant matchmaking market, where parents, professional matchmakers and grandparents go in search of a partner for their child, client or grandchild. Supposedly, many young Chinese are too busy studying or working, to have time to meet a prospective partner and woo them. Or they are too shy. So some parents use this kind of gathering to search for prospective partners for their children.
It lacks somewhat in the romance department, and I wonder how often it works out.

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