Five years ago, Qingyanliu was an unknown village of about 1,000 farmers in a suburb of Yiwu, Zhejiang . Today it has become an important business area of the city with a population of 8,000 and more than 1,800 thriving online businesses.
Five-storey farmers' houses with similar designs stand as if in a queue along Qingyan Street, the main street of the village, where large trucks pass through once in a while.
Bruce Huang is one of the online 'shopkeepers' in this neighbourhood. Like many other businesspeople, he rents an apartment and a cellar to operate a shop at taobao.com, China's biggest consumer-to-consumer e-commerce site.
The apartment is used as an office, where two young employees help him with the business every day, and the cellar is used for stockpiling goods, which he buys from Yiwu's international commodity market.
Huang said homeowners in the neighbourhood, now dubbed the taobao village since it was rebuilt by the government in 2005 and attracted many online businessmen with its cheap rent, lived a much better life than many in huge cities.
'Now that they don't have farmland to work on, many followed the trend and started their own shops and some lazier ones can simply live on the rental income,' he said.
'Since 1999, Yiwu, then a small town, has been rebuilding surrounding villages to expand its urban area.'