The alarm goes off at 5:40. I make coffee in the dark because the workshop kitchen window faces east and the sun isn't up yet. By 6:15 I'm in the car.
The drive from Lianyungang to Donghai is forty-five minutes if the highway is clear, which on a Tuesday in June it usually is. The road runs through farmland — wheat fields turning gold, the occasional small town with a single intersection. I've made this drive maybe two hundred times. I still pay attention to where the light hits the fields.
By 7:30 I'm pulling into the parking lot at Donghai Crystal Market. It's already busy. Three buses with Korean tour groups. A man unloading clear quartz spheres the size of basketballs from a flatbed. Two women arguing in Sichuanese about the price of a malachite carving. The market opens at 6:00 a.m. for wholesale; the serious buyers — that's me, that's the bracelet workshops, that's the chain-store reps — get here first.
The market is the size of an airport. Or rather, several airports, connected by walkways and stairwells and back alleys that don't always show up on the map. There are over 6,000 vendors here. Some have proper storefronts with LED signs. Others are working out of a folding table and a tarp. Both can have lots that are equally good — quality has very little to do with the look of the booth.
I park at the east entrance and head straight for Building C, third floor. That's where most of the amethyst comes in. I've been buying from the same three vendors for almost four years now. We're not friends exactly — language barriers and the dynamics of being on opposite sides of every transaction don't really allow that — but we know each other. Lao Chen, vendor 487, calls me “the buyer who's not American but sells to America.” He thinks this is hilarious. He has thought it was hilarious for four years.
Lao Chen has a new amethyst lot in this morning. He pulls a flat wooden tray out from under his table and sets it down so I can see. About sixty pieces, mostly 8mm beads, mostly the deep violet color I like. He doesn't say anything. I pick up a bead, turn it under the overhead fluorescent. There's a small color zone in the middle — angular, the kind you only see in real natural amethyst. Good. I pick up another. Same.
I look at twelve more before I say a price.
This is the part of the work that nobody tells you about. The actual choosing. The negotiation isn't dramatic — there's no fast talk or hand-clapping — it's just numbers, said quietly, adjusted, said again. We settle. I take forty of the sixty beads. The other twenty go back in the tray for someone else. I don't take everything because if I take everything, the quality of his future lots goes down. He needs other customers to keep curating well. This is the kind of thing you only learn by being there over years.
There are days I'll spend three hours on one purchase. There are days I walk in, look at what's on the table, and walk out empty-handed. The market is a kind of patience. You can't force it to have what you want on the day you arrived.
By 11:00 I'm done. Five lots from four vendors. The car trunk smells like dust and stone — there's no way to describe that smell except: it's what mineral smells like when there's a lot of it in one place. I drive back to Lianyungang with the windows cracked.
The afternoon is in the workshop. Two of my team members are there already, stringing yesterday's design. I dump the new beads into clean trays and we sort by color. The amethyst lot from Lao Chen goes into a tray we keep for “deep-violet 8mm.” It'll get strung this week, photographed, listed by Friday.
Sometime around 3:00 a customer in Berlin orders a custom bracelet that needs exactly the kind of rose quartz I didn't find this morning. So Friday I'll drive back.
That's most weeks. The drive, the picking, the slow conversation that isn't really conversation. The market. Then back to the workshop, where the real work — the stringing, the photographing, the writing — happens.
I get asked sometimes why we don't just buy from a wholesaler online. It would be much easier. It would also mean I don't know what's in the box until it shows up, which has happened to enough other people I know to make me unwilling to try. The advantage of being from here is being able to be here. So I come.
By 9:00 p.m. the workshop is quiet. I'm usually still there, doing the listing photography under the daylight lamps because that's when the color is honest. Eventually I lock up and go home. Tomorrow is Wednesday. The market is closed on Wednesdays. I sleep in.