Nothing quite prepares you for Yiwu. I'd read the numbers before I went — that this sprawling wholesale market in Zhejiang Province is one of the largest of its kind on earth, that it houses tens of thousands of vendor booths, that you could walk for days and still not see everything under its roof. Numbers like that don't mean much until you're standing in the middle of it, surrounded on every side by more of one single object than you've seen in your entire life, and you realize the number was, if anything, an understatement.

Take hot water bottles. An entire wall — floor to ceiling, aisle after aisle — devoted to nothing but hot water bottle covers. Fleece ones, corduroy ones, cartoon animals with embroidered faces, tartan patterns, quilted patterns, polka dots, sweater-knit covers that looked like they belonged on a person rather than a rubber bottle. Hundreds of them, maybe thousands, hanging in tidy color-blocked rows like the world's most specific rainbow. And that was just one booth, in one hallway, in one section, in one of dozens of buildings that make up the market.

Multiply that scene by shoelaces, by hair clips, by artificial flowers, by phone cases, by Christmas ornaments, by every small manufactured object you've ever bought without thinking twice about where it came from — and you start to get a sense of the scale of the place. It didn't take long for me to lose all sense of direction. Yiwu isn't organized like a market so much as it's organized like a small, indoor city, block after block of nearly identical corridors branching off into more corridors, each one lined with booths that blur together after the twentieth turn. I'd tell myself I was just going to pop down one more aisle to see what was there, and forty minutes later I'd have no idea which direction led back to where I started. There's something strangely humbling about being an experienced traveler and still ending up completely, cheerfully lost in a hallway of hair bows.

What struck me most wasn't any single product — it was the sheer volume of human effort represented in every direction I looked. Somewhere behind every one of those thousands of hot water bottle covers is a factory, a supply chain, a small mountain of design decisions about which cartoon bear goes on which fleece pattern. Yiwu isn't just a market. It's a physical monument to the scale of global manufacturing, laid out in aisles you can actually walk through and touch.

I left without buying a single hot water bottle cover, somehow. But I don't think I'll ever look at one quite the same way again.