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[br]There’s red on the ceiling and red on the floor, and 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, or in the Chinese city of Yiwu.
Our yuletide myth-making might like to assume that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering absent 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.
Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com