Yarn shop in Kunming China

Yarn shop in Kunming, Yunnan Province

After a week in Beijing without seeing any evidence of knitters, I began to wonder if Chinese women knit, so I was surprised and thrilled to come across large numbers of knitters in southern China.   (Apparently -my assumption here) women knit as a second job... so I saw women taxi drivers knitting while waiting for customers, shop keepers knitting during their down time, and most amazingly were the women knitting on size 1 or 2 double-pointed needles while just walking down the street while going about their daily business.    

To be more descriptive, women (and I saw no men knitting) knitted in primarily in solid colors, sometimes with cables or bold stripes, but no fair-isle designs, fancy yarns, or complicated color schemes.   Overall, the women I saw knitted with extreme efficiently -simple stockinette stitch, but very fast and highly accurate.   In Kunming, Yunnan Province, women were knitting everywhere...  which lead me to question the many "made in China" labels we see on clothes here in the US.   I have naturally assumed these are knit by machine in some massive factory, but in China, manpower -or womanpower -seemed a more readily available resource than electricity or machines.   Perhaps some of those items that end up on our store racks that I assume are machine-knit, are actually hand-knit by one of these women just trying to make a few yuan on the side.   Perhaps these women were like most of us and just knitting for the family... or pondering who might appreciate that next hand knit sweater, but somehow... it didn't seem so.   So where does all that knitting go?

Shop keepers on a slow day, socializing over their knitting.     Multi-tasking was a theme with knitters.    I learned to say "you knit well" in Mandarin... while my accent was horrible, my efforts earned me smiles, laughs, and reprieve from any efforts to sell me trinkets in the market.