The Chinese have a very cunning way of promoting their factory products to the tourism trade. Each factory is strategically centred near a restaurant capable of handling bus loads of tourists who are led to lunch via the factory outlet where they are handed discount vouchers for purchase of goods and a complimentary tour through the factory by a very smooth talking representative.
The Silk Factory was the outlet we stopped at at lunchtime today and proved to be one of the better ones. The factory gave us a demonstation of how the silk got from the silkworms through the looms and then hand stretched to form bed covers (see images attached).
The facory had several floors like a department store and had not only bed covers, sheets, pillowslips but also silk clothing which was very beautiful and reasonably priced. We did quite a bit of buying there as the products were good quality.
Downstairs in the bus parking area were the street merchants flogging their ware and we had quite a bit of fun with them especially the watch sellers. We started off with buying just a few watches, then John offered them 300 yuen for the whole case of watches (37 watches). As our bus was about to leave the merchants must have thought that some sale was better than nothing and sold John the whole case (photo attached) - total cost about AUD $50. John was then promoted to champion of buyers on our trip. Later in the day at the Temple of Heaven we got the Gucci handbags down from 150 yuen to four for 100 yuen. We thought that was pretty good buying too. I ended up with seven gucci bags so guess what everyone at home got.
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