Why China Yunnan Region is amazing?

Yunnan is heart of the traditions and the Culture in South of China.

Dali is the 1st supplier of Tea, Jade, Silver, Silk Broidery and Wood. According to my own experience, Dali people are the Kings of Business and Negotiations, even if they are not so Digital, they really know how to do business.

1. Cultural Business such as:

Tea business

Tea is the heart of the local Yunnan trading. They are selling tea (black, Green, Red teas an tea with flowers like roses) in the traditional ways like with hand made typical Chinese boxes. You can also have different types of tea purchases including tea boxes, tea cakes, tea balls, pyramidal shaped tea. The selling tea can be very expensive for the people who do not negotiate. In china you have to negotiate the tea price. It is part of the rules of the market. One rule: bargaining.

Jade business

Jade is a famous stone, extracted, hand worked and sold massively in in Yunnan shops. Jade business is a major régional market fueling a wide range of commercial activities.In Dali they have plenty of jade shops where you can can find jewelries, Chinese symbols like smiley Buddha’s, fish, Lotus ….

Silk broidery business

Silk Broidery is part of the Yunnan culture. You can find specific schools in Xi Zhou and in Baisha. Chinese girls can learn for free how to do broidery and can sell their own work by getting 10% of their selling own Broidery. In each school you can have their Broidery work and they are exposed like painters can do their own canvas. The Mu’s Broidery school is such an example. Please find video below one of the Broidery artist with her interpretation of the Ying and the Yang.

Silver business

The market of Silver is the most important business by selling hand made tea pots, jewelries and various kind of designed products in silver. You have plenty of local shops of silver goods in the old village of Dali. Therefore this is the place to be for silver business. All types of negotiations can be done.

Woodcarving business

The Wood business is a real market in the Yunnan mountains areas such as Shanxi and Lijiang. They are selling a lot of curving wood goods like wood tables, statues, jewelries and all kind of typical hand made products manufactured by wood in front of you at the entrance of each local store.

2. Chinese Business

A – Business Negotiations

Yunnan with Dali, Lijiang and Shanxi villages, places to be for business putting the price up even if it is such an irrational amount. Then négociations can start within even more than 1 hour. For example to buy Silk home made tapestries. I had this experience there and it was amazing to see from the beginning to the end how the négociations can be:

At the beginning: the seller puts his price conditions then we put our tarifs.
During the negotiation time: the seller can wait and have silence breaks by listening to you or by waiting for replies
At the end of the negotiation: it is like we are like so good friends if se found a compromise for the negotiations. The seller can call you “my friend” when you make the deal.

B – Offline to Online Business

As I notice, Chinese people are really excellent at making money by selling Jade, Silver, Tea, wood… They are really experts by doing offline business, I am sure they can amplify their way of doing online business under several Chinese websites. For example for the business of wood table in Shanxi, the owner of the shop always has a website, a QR Code WeChat contact and access to Chinese e-commerce plateform in order to deal with the purchaser.

First, Chinese sellers prefer to know more about you,the way you do the 1st offline exchange in Business. The human contact is really important for Chinese people. Therefore they want to know you first before doing business with you (the ceremony of Tea Exchange between the seller and the purchaser is really part of the negotiation).

At the bottom, that’s why in some way it is a little bit complicated do business with Chinese people for Western Customers because you have to deal with the sellers in Mandarin language.

Secondly they use both, offline and Internet access to build their business and to increase their turnover all over China, in Asia and in the Western countries. In China, for example they use 6 famous Chinese websites platforms or Apps to sell their traditional goods in the domestic market and overseas which are the following ones: