The streets around Binwang Market constitute one of the most unexpected urban environments in provincial China: blocks of Arabic-language signage, mosques, halal butchers, Middle Eastern grocery stores, and restaurants serving Levantine, Central Asian, and Subcontinental food. Tens of thousands of merchants from the Arab world, South Asia, and Africa have settled in Yiwu to source goods from the trade market, and the community has shaped several city blocks into something that feels more like a Levantine trading quarter than a Zhejiang city.
The Binwang Textile Market is smaller and more manageable than the International Trade City and carries a different character — more informal, more evidently a working wholesale environment, with bales of cloth stacked to the ceiling and traders from a dozen countries arguing prices in a mix of Mandarin, Arabic, and English. The surrounding streets have good halal restaurants, North African tea shops, and grocers with products imported from the Middle East, and wandering the neighbourhood is genuinely interesting in a way that the official market complex, for all its scale, is not.