The Wangdingdi market on the outskirts of this fast-growing port city in north-east China is an extraordinary sight. It might be the world’s largest bicycle market; it’s certainly the loudest. In the roiling heat of a Chinese summer, touts at the market gather in a liquid throng, moving like mercury, urging — sometimes almost rugby-tackling — you into their stalls.
Each shop is virtually identical, smelling in equal measures of garlic, vinegar and armpits, and packed to the gills with every type of bicycle: some designed for the town; some for mountain trails; some, to judge by their battered appearance, for the scrapheap. But the star of the market is the Flying Pigeon, the grande dame of Chinese bicycles, based on a 1936 Raleigh and built solidly enough to withstand a charging hippopotamus. Half a billion are believed to be in use across the country.
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