聖誕老人車間 製造全球聖誕飾品的義烏

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 cannon 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。

　　天花板是紅的，地板是紅的，紅色從窗臺滴落，紅色濺滿了牆壁。這看上去就像藝術家安尼施·卡普爾又把他的蠟塞到炮筒裏在房間裏放了一炮似的。但這實際上就是聖誕節的製作過程，這是聖誕老人真正的車間的核心——它離北極有幾千英里遠，就在中國義烏。

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 baubles, 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。

　　我們的聖誕神話可能更喜歡想象，在北極圈裏某個銀裝素裹的小木屋，裏面臉頰紅潤的小精靈錘錘打打造出了聖誕飾品。但這不是真的。你家的聖誕裝飾球、金屬箔、你掛滿屋的閃閃發亮的LED燈，它們十有八九是從義烏來的。義烏在上海以南300公里，那裏既沒有真正的松樹，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 entirely sure what Christmas is。

義烏被稱作“中國聖誕村”，有600家工廠，它們共同生產出了全世界60%的聖誕裝飾品，從發光的光纖聖誕樹，到毛氈聖誕帽，不一而足。在這些工廠裏工作的“精靈”們大部分都是外來工，一天工作12小時，每個月最多拿到200-300英鎊——我們發現他們並不完全瞭解什麼是聖誕節。

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

　　魏每天至少要帶十個口罩，以防吸入紅色的塵霧

“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 lair, 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(中國的)新年吧，就是外國人過的節。”19歲的魏這麼對中國的新浪新聞說。他今年從貴州農村到義烏工作，和他的父親一起，在濺滿了紅色的洞穴裏每天工作很長時間。拿起泡沫雪花，把它們泡在膠水裏，然後把它們放進塗粉末的機器裏，直到它們變成紅色——他就是這樣每天生產出5000件產品。

In the process, the two of them end up dusted from head to toe in fine crimson powder. His dad wears a Santa hat (not for the festive 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 vat of red powder again。

　　在這個過程中，父子倆最後都會從頭到腳沾滿紅色的細小粉末。他的父親戴着一頂聖誕帽(他說，不是爲了應節，只是爲了不讓頭髮變紅)，爲了不吸入粉塵，父子倆每天都分別用掉至少10個口罩。這份工作很累人，他們明年可能不會再幹了：只要他們掙到了魏結婚用的錢，他們就打算會貴州老家，就有希望再也不用見到成桶的紅色粉末了。

Packaged up in plastic bags, their gleaming red snowflakes hang alongside a wealth of other festive paraphernalia 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 sprawling trade show of everything in the world that you don’t need and yet may, at some irrational moment, feel compelled to buy. There are whole streets in the labyrinthine complex devoted 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 meticulously catalogued back into 62,000 booths。

　　他們閃着微光的紅色雪花會用塑料袋包起來，和一大堆其他的聖誕裝飾品一起掛滿義烏國際商貿市場。這裏又稱中國小商品城，是塑料廉價製品構成的一個4百萬平方米的神奇世界。這兒是兩元店天堂，巨大的貿易展，裏面有世界上全部你雖然不必買但在某些時候又不得不買的東西。迷宮般的建築裏面一條條的街賣的都是假花、充氣玩具，還有雨傘、雨衣、塑料桶和時鐘等。這就像一座巨大的、好幾層的全球消費品紀念碑，好像全世界的垃圾填埋場裏的東西都被挖了出來，重組之後又仔細地劃歸到這6萬2千個小攤裏。

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

　　這兩個人一天能生產5000個紅色雪花，每個月拿摺合300英鎊的工資

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

　　這座複雜的建築被聯合國宣佈爲“世界上最大的小商品批發市場”，它的運作規模比得上城市規劃，被劃分爲五個不同的區域。第二區就是聖誕飾品所在的地方。

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

　　有些走廊專門展示金屬箔，除此之外什麼都沒有，還有些走廊裏就像有比賽一樣的LED燈光展，還有各種尺碼的襪子、藍的黃的熒光粉的塑料聖誕樹、金色銀色的塑料松果。有一些商品感覺在文化溝通裏出了點兒問題：戴着聖誕帽的綿羊，繡着蘇格蘭格子花紋的馴鹿，當然了也有很多無法理解的中國產品——吹薩克斯的聖誕老人。

It might look like a wondrous bounty, 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 mere 400,000 products。

　　這種繁榮看起來很奇妙，但這個市場的輝煌歲月似乎已經過去了：它正在敗給像阿里巴巴[微博]和中國製造網這樣的互聯網巨頭。僅僅在阿里巴巴一個平臺上，你就能訂到140萬種不同的聖誕飾品，只需你輕輕一點鍵盤它們就能送到你家。相比之下，義烏商城只有40萬種存貨。

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

　　義烏國際商貿市場第二區的一條陳列聖誕商品的過道

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, vice 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 Economist, is now better known to most Chinese people than Jesus。

　　在全世界樂於購買打折產品的經濟衰退期，針對低端市場的義烏商貿發展了起來，但今年，國際銷量也下降了。但義烏市聖誕用品行業協會副會長蔡勤亮表示，由於中國正準備過這一年一度的物質氣息濃郁的節日，國內的需求量正在上漲。《經濟學人》雜誌寫道，對大部分中國人來說聖誕老人比耶穌更出名。

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。”

　　喜氣洋洋的義烏市場銷售代表們要是能一輩子都過聖誕節的話就再高興不過了。博揚工藝廠(音)的聯合創始人之一程亞平(音)說：“每天坐在這裏，能夠看到這些漂亮的裝飾品，心情真是棒極了。”他的小攤裝飾得像個迷你的冬季仙境一樣。

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

　　但是對那些在生產線另一頭的工人們來說呢？他們的生活就只剩下在一片紅通通的車間裏給那些賣0.99元的泡沫雪花上色了，他們的感覺不太像會是這樣的。