There’s red on the ceiling and red on the floor, red dripping from the window sills and red globules splattered across the walls. It looks like the artist Anish Kapoor has been let loose with his wax cannon¹ again. But this, in fact, is what the making of Christmas looks like; this is the very heart of the real Santa’s workshop – thousands of miles from the North Pole, in the Chinese city of Yiwu。

天花板是红的，地板是红的，红色从窗台滴落，红色溅满了墙壁。这看上去就像艺术家安尼施·卡普尔又把他的蜡塞到炮筒里在房间里放了一炮似的。但这实际上就是圣诞节的制作过程，这是圣诞老人真正的车间的核心——它离北极有几千英里远，就在中国义乌。

Our yuletide myth-making might like to imagine that Christmas is made by rosy-cheeked elves hammering away in a snow-bound log cabin somewhere in the Arctic Circle. But it’s not. The likelihood is that most of those baubles², tinsel and flashing LED lights you’ve draped liberally around your house came from Yiwu, 300km south of Shanghai – where there’s not a (real) pine tree nor (natural) snowflake in sight。

我们的圣诞神话可能更喜欢想象，在北极圈里某个银装素裹的小木屋，里面脸颊红润的小精灵锤锤打打造出了圣诞饰品。但这不是真的。你家的圣诞装饰球、金属箔、你挂满屋的闪闪发亮的LED灯，它们十有八九是从义乌来的。义乌在上海以南300公里，那里既没有真正的松树，也看不到天然雪花。

Christened “China’s Christmas village”， Yiwu is home to 600 factories that collectively churn out over 60% of all the world’s Christmas decorations and accessories, from glowing fibre-optic trees to felt Santa hats. The “elves” that staff these factories are mainly migrant labourers, working 12 hours a day for a maximum of ￡200 to ￡300 a month – and it turns out they’re not entirely³ sure what Christmas is。

义乌被称作“中国圣诞村”，有600家工厂，它们共同生产出了全世界60%的圣诞装饰品，从发光的光纤圣诞树，到毛毡圣诞帽，不一而足。在这些工厂里工作的“精灵”们大部分都是外来工，一天工作12小时，每个月最多拿到200-300英镑——我们发现他们并不完全了解什么是圣诞节。

Wei gets through at least 10 face masks each day, trying not to breathe in the cloud of red dust. Photograph: Imaginechina/Rex

魏每天至少要带十个口罩，以防吸入红色的尘雾

“Maybe it’s like [Chinese] New Year for foreigners,” says 19-year-old Wei, a worker who came to Yiwu from rural Guizhou province this year, speaking to Chinese news agency Sina. Together with his father, he works long days in the red-splattered lair⁴, taking polystyrene snowflakes, dipping them in a bath of glue, then putting them in a powder-coating machine until they turn red – and making 5,000 of the things every day。

“可能就像(中国的)新年吧，就是外国人过的节。”19岁的魏这么对中国的新浪新闻说。他今年从贵州农村到义乌工作，和他的父亲一起，在溅满了红色的洞穴里每天工作很长时间。拿起泡沫雪花，把它们泡在胶水里，然后把它们放进涂粉末的机器里，直到它们变成红色——他就是这样每天生产出5000件产品。

In the process, the two of them end up dusted from head to toe in fine crimson⁵ powder. His dad wears a Santa hat (not for the festive⁶ spirit, he says, but to stop his hair from turning red) and they both get through at least 10 face masks a day, trying not to breathe in the dust. It’s a tiring job and they probably won’t do it again next year: once they’ve earned enough money for Wei to get married, they plan on returning home to Guizhou and hopefully never seeing a vat⁷ of red powder again。

在这个过程中，父子俩最后都会从头到脚沾满红色的细小粉末。他的父亲戴着一顶圣诞帽(他说，不是为了应节，只是为了不让头发变红)，为了不吸入粉尘，父子俩每天都分别用掉至少10个口罩。这份工作很累人，他们明年可能不会再干了：只要他们挣到了魏结婚用的钱，他们就打算会贵州老家，就有希望再也不用见到成桶的红色粉末了。

Packaged up in plastic bags, their gleaming red snowflakes hang alongside a wealth of other festive paraphernalia⁸ across town in the Yiwu International Trade Market, aka China Commodity City, a 4m sq m wonder-world of plastic tat. It is a pound shop paradise, a sprawling⁹ trade show of everything in the world that you don’t need and yet may, at some irrational¹⁰ moment, feel compelled to buy. There are whole streets in the labyrinthine¹¹ complex devoted¹² to artificial flowers and inflatable toys, then come umbrellas and anoraks, plastic buckets and clocks. It is a heaving multistorey monument to global consumption, as if the contents of all the world’s landfill sites had been dug-up, re-formed and meticulously¹³ catalogued back into 62,000 booths。

他们闪着微光的红色雪花会用塑料袋包起来，和一大堆其他的圣诞装饰品一起挂满义乌国际商贸市场。这里又称中国小商品城，是塑料廉价制品构成的一个4百万平方米的神奇世界。这儿是两元店天堂，巨大的贸易展，里面有世界上全部你虽然不必买但在某些时候又不得不买的东西。迷宫般的建筑里面一条条的街卖的都是假花、充气玩具，还有雨伞、雨衣、塑料桶和时钟等。这就像一座巨大的、好几层的全球消费品纪念碑，好像全世界的垃圾填埋场里的东西都被挖了出来，重组之后又仔细地划归到这6万2千个小摊里。

The two men produce 5,000 red snowflakes a day, and get paid around ￡300 a month. Photograph: China Daily/Reuters

这两个人一天能生产5000个红色雪花，每个月拿折合300英镑的工资

The complex was declared by the UN to be the “largest small commodity wholesale¹⁴ market in the world” and the scale of the operation necessitates¹⁵ a kind of urban plan, with this festival of commerce organised into five different districts. District Two is where Christmas can be found。

这座复杂的建筑被联合国宣布为“世界上最大的小商品批发市场”，它的运作规模比得上城市规划，被划分为五个不同的区域。第二区就是圣诞饰品所在的地方。

There are corridors lined with nothing but tinsel, streets throbbing¹⁶ with competing LED light shows, stockings of every size, plastic Christmas trees in blue and yellow and fluorescent¹⁷ pink, plastic pine cones¹⁸ in gold and silver. Some of it seems lost in translation: there are sheep in Santa hats and tartan-embroidered reindeer¹⁹, and of course lots of that inexplicable²⁰ Chinese staple²¹, Father Christmas playing the saxophone。

有些走廊专门展示金属箔，除此之外什么都没有，还有些走廊里就像有比赛一样的LED灯光展，还有各种尺码的袜子、蓝的黄的荧光粉的塑料圣诞树、金色银色的塑料松果。有一些商品感觉在文化沟通里出了点儿问题：戴着圣诞帽的绵羊，绣着苏格兰格子花纹的驯鹿，当然了也有很多无法理解的中国产品——吹萨克斯的圣诞老人。

It might look like a wondrous²² bounty²³, but the market’s glory days seem to have passed: it’s now losing out to internet giants like Alibaba and Made In China. On Alibaba alone, you can order 1.4m different Christmas decorations to be delivered to your door at the touch of a button. Yiwu market, by comparison, stocks a mere²⁴ 400,000 products。

这种繁荣看起来很奇妙，但这个市场的辉煌岁月似乎已经过去了：它正在败给像阿里巴巴[微博]和中国制造网这样的互联网巨头。仅仅在阿里巴巴一个平台上，你就能订到140万种不同的圣诞饰品，只需你轻轻一点键盘它们就能送到你家。相比之下，义乌商城只有40万种存货。

A Christmas corridor in District Two of Yiwu International Trade Market. Photograph: /flickr

义乌国际商贸市场第二区的一条陈列圣诞商品的过道

Aiming at the lower end of the market, Yiwu’s sales thrived during the recession, as the world shopped for cut-price festive fun, but international sales are down this year. Still, according to Cai Qingliang, vice²⁵ chairman of the Yiwu Christmas Products Industry Association, domestic appetite is on the rise, as China embraces the annual festival of Mammon. Santa Claus, says the Economist²⁶, is now better known to most Chinese people than Jesus。

在全世界乐于购买打折产品的经济衰退期，针对低端市场的义乌商贸发展了起来，但今年，国际销量也下降了。但义乌市圣诞用品行业协会副会长蔡勤亮表示，由于中国正准备过这一年一度的物质气息浓郁的节日，国内的需求量正在上涨。《经济学人》杂志写道，对大部分中国人来说圣诞老人比耶稣更出名。

The beaming sales reps of Yiwu market couldn’t sound happier with their life sentence of eternal Christmastime. According to Cheng Yaping, co-founder of the Boyang Craft Factory, who runs a stall decked out like a miniature winter wonderland: “Sitting here every day, being able to look at all these beautiful decorations, is really great for your mood。”

喜气洋洋的义乌市场销售代表们要是能一辈子都过圣诞节的话就再高兴不过了。博扬工艺厂(音)的联合创始人之一程亚平(音)说：“每天坐在这里，能够看到这些漂亮的装饰品，心情真是棒极了。”他的小摊装饰得像个迷你的冬季仙境一样。

It’s somehow unlikely that those on the other end of the production line, consigned²⁷ to dipping snowflakes in red-swamped workshops for us to pick up at the checkout²⁸ for 99p, feel quite the same way。

但是对那些在生产线另一头的工人们来说呢？他们的生活就只剩下在一片红通通的车间里给那些卖0.99元的泡沫雪花上色了，他们的感觉不太像会是这样的。