Beijing Books Whole Sale & Trading Center

[chin]

I was in Beijing last week, and one the way back had about 2 hours to kill. I asked the driver to take me to the closest book store, and he took me to the whole sale market.

He apparently never set foot inside the building, or he would have known that this is no one book store, but hundreds of small ones in one building.

[chin]

The wholesales center has at least 3 floors. From this picture, you can see the metal structure on the left of the stair, for transporting books in bulk up and down the stairs.

On each floor, there are maybe 100 small book shops each maybe 100 sq ft in area. Many are specialized, like reference books, kid's books (like the one in the 3rd picture), magazines, calendars, etc...

[chin]

The place is not meant to be a retail outlet. The whole deco and design is very utilitarian. People came with book lists, and purchase by packages wrap in paper containing maybe 20 books.

They also sell to retail customers like me, at 10% to 20% discount off the list price. I would have bought many books had I have the luggage space and time. But for this time I only bought 3 books - one about red tea, one about street sales person cum con man in the 30s in Beijing & Tianjing, and one book on Korean War.