The Jiangdong wholesale seafood market on the south bank of the Yong River opens in the pre-dawn hours and operates at full intensity between about 5am and 8am, when fishing boats from the Zhoushan islands and the Ningbo coastal fleet unload their catches. The market handles the full range of East China Sea seafood: live crabs in stacked plastic crates, tanks of sea cucumbers and mantis shrimp, boxes of yellow croaker and hairtail fish, and the smaller invertebrates — razor clams, sea snails, limpets — that appear in Ningbo's more obscure seafood preparations.
The market is a working wholesale operation rather than a tourist attraction and operates at a pace that rewards confident navigation. Arriving at 6am and spending an hour watching the trade before heading to a nearby breakfast restaurant for tang yuan or ci fan is an excellent way to understand what ends up in Ningbo's restaurant tanks and to see a commercial activity that predates the city's other visitor attractions by several centuries.