Yiwu

Yiwu (simplified Chinese: 义乌; pinyin: Yìwū) is a city of about 2,000,000 people in central Zhejiang Province near the central eastern coast of the People's Republic of China.

Yiwu in Zhejiang Province

The city is famous for its small commodity trade and vibrant free markets and is a regional tourist destination. Although administratively Yiwu is a county-level city under the governance of Jinhua, its fame nationally surpasses that of Jinhua, the prefecture-level city of which it is technically under jurisdiction.

Yiwu is located 100 km south of the city of Hangzhou, the capital of Zhejiang Province. The nearest city to Yiwu is Dongyang. The area, as in most of the Province of Zhejiang, is in a mountainous region.

Yiwu is technically part of the greater Municipal region of Jinhua, although it has a distinct urban core. On China's administrative strata it is a sub-prefecture level city. It has under its jurisdiction 15 towns and 8 villages, which covers 1102.8 square kilometers, 15 square kilometers of which are urban area of 650,000 people (2005 estimate). There has been talk of merging the Yiwu and Jinhua areas into a single municipal zone or economic entity, but this plan has yet to make its way into any formal discussion.