The two cities could not have been more different. Qingdao, a laidback port city – which has a naval base — with a lovely stretch of beach looking on to the Yellow Sea, a long, gleaming boulevard clinging to it, a beer culture and a German concession area with lovely villas and leafy, quiet roads. And Yiwu, a busy, crowded city buzzing with traders and stretches – really long stretches of buildings after buildings that look identical – of retail shops; hundreds of thousands of shops that just might make the weak drop like a sack of gifts after the retail therapy is done with.
I was in Qingdao in Shandong province first to attend an international naval exercise in which the pride of the Indian navy, the stealth frigate INS Shivalik, took part. The warship is a grand one built with state-of-the- art technology and nearly 300 smart and proud crew members, all crisply dressed.
Qingdao was for years under German rule followed by Japanese occupation. The German imprint endures prominently to this day with the Chinese government allowing many of the old European-styled buildings to remain. A large chunk of the city – often said to be among the most livable in China – has been left more or less like the way it was. The distinctly European feel easily sets it apart from probably all of China’s cities.
The world famous Tsingtao brewery is located in the heart of Qingdao. Beer is drunk with gusto by the city’s residents. It was quite a charming to see residents carrying plastic bags filled with draught Tsingtao on their way back home from work.
And like the Oktoberfest in Germany, Qingdao boasts of its own annual beer festival every summer, said to be the biggest in Asia.
According to the state-run China Daily newspaper, in 2013, the 16-day festival of beer attracted more than 4 million people from home and around the world.
Yiwu probably attracts that many people from abroad around the year. After all, it is the retail shop for the world.
Yiwu in Zhejiang province, a city worlds apart from Qingdao, was my second stop last week.
It is busy, crowded with people from all over the world who have come there to source small consumer products to sell, well, to the rest of the world.
A large number of traders from African countries – as many as 90000 – frequent the city. Indians can be found everywhere. The city has a hotel in the city centre called the Yindu – India in Chinese – Business hotel. It boasts of a handful of Indian restaurants as well.
The city is peppered with massive retail malls. Most are not as glitzy as we know malls to be. No movie theatres in them, no fancy restaurants or trendy coffee shops. Instead, you have row and rows of shops selling millions of products. Most malls dedicate one floor – and the sprawling floors have hundreds of shops – selling one-type of product: toys, Christmas gifts, artefacts, linen, cutlery and the list is endless. The shops cater to the bulk purchaser as well as to the individual buyer. Products are sold at bargain prices; a good 50 percent or less than the price in any big city.