I was going for a cycle ride to the river and decided to go down Damuqiao Lu for a change. Maybe it’s a Sunday market – I certainly hadn’t noticed it before. There were lots of stalls and sheets spread out on the ground covered with old coins, jade, beads, antique (or not!) items.
It’s hard to wander around markets like this because as soon as you falter at a stall, the expectation is that you will buy something. So I ended up walking slowly while trying to look at everything without stopping at a stall and giving the stallholder false hope of a sale.
There was even a stall with bits of broken pottery. Many of the stalls seemed to be selling identical items and you would probably need to be better informed than me, in order not to pay over the odds here. 
It’seasy to collect clutter and I am determined, now I have emptied by storage unit in the UK, not to accumulate stuff again. Maybe when I leave this place, I will go and buy a few little things as souvenirs, but I certianly don’t want to fill this small flat up with junk.
I don’t know how many jade bracelets there are in China but I see them for sale everywhere I go. However, I don’t ever see people wearing them. Why would you buy a bracelet you don’t ever wear?
I guess it’s similar to buying moon cakes (which is happening right now) – people buy them just to give them to friends and family.
Nobody seems to ever eat them, just give and recieve them. They are strange things, dense and full of sweet red bean or pork. If I get given any, I pass them on to my elderly neighbour. He seems happy to receive them.