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At the center of Shenzhen, a city in Southern China not too far from Hong Kong, lies a special little district called Shuibei.
Shuibei is known as a place to go if you're looking to buy one specific thing.
Gold.
Shuibei is among the largest gold retail markets in the world and definitely the largest in China by volume of gold.
That's Bloomberg reporter Chongjing Li, based in Hong Kong.
So, if you go to the Shuibei market, there are like more than 10,000 businesses clustered across several city blocks.
You will be greeted by endless rows of glittering jewelry that would make your head spin.
And at almost any time of the day,
the place always buzzes with crowds of customers, eagling, browsing, selecting, and snapping up their favorite pieces.
The popularity of this market has been fueled in part by live streamers who hawked their gold on Douyin, China's TikTok.
And while gold has always been a popular commodity in China,
the investment demand for the precious metal is attracting attention lately.
With the slowdown in the Chinese economy, people have been shrinking their spending on all kinds of goods.
Jewelry purchases like diamonds have really taken a hit as Chinese buyers have tightened their belts.
But the allure of gold as a safe place to park one's cash remains,
and you're seeing consumers showing persistent demand for investment products like gold bars and coins as a way to safeguard wealth.
Welcome to the Big Tech Asia from Bloomberg News.
I'm Wan Ha.
Every week we take you inside some of the world's biggest and most powerful economies,