Photo of the day: Squishy Toys in Yiwu

Continuing this week’s photo theme — Things in Yiwu.

Yiwu just sent its first freight train to Prague:

A train loaded with 88 containers of cloth, clothing, shoes, hats and Christmas items left east China’s Yiwu City Sunday morning for Prague, the Czech Republic. It will pass through Kazakhstan, Russia, Belarus, and Poland and travel about 16 days before arriving in Prague. The journey is about half the time for traditional sea voyage. On August 4, the first train from Prague arrived at Yiwu, east China’s Zhejiang province. Before the launch of the Prague route, Yiwu, often called the “world supermarket,” already boasted eight freight train routes.

Radii’s founder Brian Wong went to Yiwu recently and found that among the things wholesaled in this “world supermarket” are: squishy toys.

Maybe these aren’t as big overseas. In most major Chinese cities you can find street hawkers perched over pretty much any bridge moving these things. You smash them on the ground and they make a satisfying splat, then slowly reconstitute their original shape, insofar as they have “shape.”

Kind of a niche thing but Yiwu sells them in bulk.

Want some of those Gudetama ones myself…