Shaoxing
Prefecture of 5.4 million whose Keqiao district runs the world's largest fabric market — one quarter of global textile transactions, 500,000 daily buyers.
A quarter of the world's textile transactions flow through a single district of a city most people outside China have never heard of. Shaoxing, a prefecture of 5.4 million in Zhejiang province, sits in the Yangtze River Delta about 60 kilometres from Hangzhou. Its Wikipedia entry leads with rice wine, ancient canals, and the birthplace of writer Lu Xun. What it undersells is that Shaoxing's Keqiao district operates the largest fabric wholesale market on Earth — 3.85 million square metres of trading floor, 62,000 registered companies, and 500,000 buyer visits per day from 187 countries.
The numbers are difficult to overstate. China Textile City, built from a small marketplace in the 1980s, now handles annual transactions exceeding ¥100 billion ($14 billion). Turnover jumped from ¥760 million in 1988 to ¥63 billion by 2008, then kept climbing. Roughly 83% of global textile production originates in China, and Keqiao is where the largest share of it changes hands. The 2024 Paris Olympics illustrated the reach: not just China's team but Canada's entire apparel print run came from Keqiao suppliers. Locally, 90% of Keqiao's residents work in fabric or related industries.
Shaoxing's GDP reached ¥836.9 billion ($116 billion) in 2024, growing 6.5% — the second-fastest rate in Zhejiang. The city has begun diversifying into optoelectronics, artificial intelligence, and new energy, but textiles remain the gravitational centre. This is preferential attachment at industrial scale: traders come because the market is already the largest, suppliers cluster because the traders are already there, and the whole system reinforces itself through sheer density of connections. Remove Keqiao's marketplace and global fast-fashion supply chains would need years to reconstitute.
The biological parallel is the silk moth — an organism whose entire existence was reshaped by niche construction. Bombyx mori was domesticated so thoroughly that it lost the ability to fly or survive in the wild. Shaoxing has undergone an analogous transformation: a city so completely restructured around textile trade that the industry and the city are now inseparable. The silk moth cannot exist without its constructed environment, and Keqiao cannot exist without the market it built.