Time is wearing away the original luster of the legend, but the memory is trying to leave something behind. Now, we start to find a farmer. An unknown but familiar farmer. He was wearing a faded blue shirt and green army trousers, carrying a load and walking from the mud in the countryside.The sun is shining on him, his footsteps are hesitant but persistent. Who is he? He shakes his drum, and goes to far, strange places to sell that crude hope.He yelled in front of the Diaojiaolou of the Dai people, and he chased after the horses in Saibei. Who is he? He chose a place to live and started to have his own stall.Then.He had comrades of his own, and he pitched a shed with them.His voice began to gain some strength.

Who is he? He was expelled everywhere; he became a "little tail of capitalism" in order to get rid of poverty; he had no way to sue, but he was still stubborn and persistent like all his ancestors. Who is he? He became the first batch of 10,000 yuan households in the local area.He carefully expanded his wealth.He got more villagers to come closer to him, and when there were more people, it turned into an unstoppable dream of getting rich. Who is he? Then, he had his own workshop and his own transportation team.He started trading in houses with concrete structures.He learned to use a computer and picked up a "big brother", but he still looks awkward in his tie.

Who is he? Now, he started to build the city.He wants to have his own city, so there are those peasant cities surrounded by rice fields, those "cities that never sleep" where copper coins dance day and night.He is at ease in his own city. Who is he? Who are they? Through the fog of time, we want to try our best to recognize his and their faces, to get close to their figures, to touch their tears and smiles. At the Yiwu Small Commodity Market, we tried more than once to find the farmer who was the first to set up a stall in the city with a load of chicken feathers. Today, 15 years later, he is either rich and well-off, or he is still sweating and running his own stall;

Walking through the bustling crowd in Commodity City, we always seem to be able to truly feel his breath, his sweat, and his sighs.No one knows exactly where he is, but he's definitely living on somewhere. In the recycled acrylic fiber market in Yishan, Wenzhou, there is a story about an old lady named Sun Atu.It is said that she invented the simple process of acrylic fiber regeneration in 1979, which led to the surrounding villages selling this recycled product to the north and south of the river, and tens of thousands of people were lifted out of poverty and made a fortune. However, when we arrived at Yishan, Mrs. Sun had already passed away.Someone described the situation to us with tears, saying that on the day of the funeral, thousands of factories and shops around were automatically shut down for three days, and tens of thousands of villagers who had embarked on the road to wealth because of her grace wore white flowers on their heads. Sacrifice, funeral for it.

In the Qiaotou Button Market, there is a legend about the story of two brothers.Back then, they brought back a bag of scrap buttons from Henan, which kicked off the start of the largest button trading market in Asia.But by the time we got there, there were so many stories about the names and whereabouts of the two brothers that there were at least five "versions" in our notebooks.In the end, we can't help but wonder the veracity of these legends: Are they real people, or are they just fictional characters based on their shared experiences by market creators? In the early years of Keqiao Textile Market in Shaoxing, because Keqiao had no dry roads to go in many directions, many individual farmers with black awning boats appeared.They pick up and drop off customers paddle by paddle, and the business is naturally negotiated in this back and forth.Some of them have become millionaires successively.

This news was told to us by one of our colleagues.But when we asked about these characters in Shaoxing, local officials laughed and said that unless you memorized their names at the time, it would be difficult to find them.Because, in Keqiao, there are so many ways to get rich and legends that people can't agree on what to do. That is to say, every time, the closer we get to the core of the legend, the more confusing the details and characters of the legend become. However, we did find them. One year, when we went to Xinjiang for interviews, we happened to hear that there was a "Yiwu Street" somewhere on the edge of the desert in southern Xinjiang, so we drove over a thousand kilometers in a jeep to get there.It was a enclosure with only a hundred or so families, and all the residents and visitors were nomadic ethnic minorities.However, the most important commercial area in the area is a "Yiwu Street" consisting of more than a hundred stalls. The stall owners are all farmers and traders from Jinhua and Wenzhou in Zhejiang Province.These people living in the Jiangnan water town came to the great desert in a sweltering truck, and then traveled thousands of miles with the camel team to stay here.Now, they have almost become the most important commodity suppliers with a radius of hundreds of square kilometers, which surprised us very much.

Standing on that dusty, narrow and lively dirt street, looking at those Zhejiang farmers who have left their hometowns and come here, and are doing business with the locals in blunt Tajik or Kazakh and "sign language", we seem to have found that person. Another year, when we were interviewing in Wanding, a frontier fortress in Yunnan, we were suddenly stopped by a farmer from Zhejiang who was sweeping the floor at the border station.It turned out that he recognized our Zhejiang accent and hoped that we could intercede for him.He is from Wenzhou. He wanted to sell his glasses in Bangzhai, Myanmar, but was caught when he crossed the border.Soldiers at the border defense station told us that several such Zhejiang people can be caught every month, and it is very simple to deal with them:

After working as a cleaner for a week, I let them go. Looking at the bent figure sweeping the ground silently, we seem to have found that person again. Such a search left us a little at a loss from the very beginning. They are a little "far away".In this era of reform, people are more willing to look forward than to recall, and what we want to pursue is precisely those who are the least expressive.They are so dull, so dull, that most of them don't know or care about the role they are playing in history. I don’t know which economist made such a sentiment: After decades of monolithic planned economic life was broken, in the process of transitioning to a market economy, the first to rush into the market and gain something were those who were in the market. The farmers who are farthest from the market in spirit, experience and even geography.

They are the most successful people in this era, and they have created countless myths.They almost broke free from a very primitive state of existence, and became the creators of modern civilization in a very short period of time.They are not the farmers in Jiangsu and Zhejiang in the 1930s in Fei Xiaotong's vision, nor are they the farmers in northern Shaanxi in the 1940s described by Zhao Shuli. They are not Dazhai-style farmers or Xiaogang Village farmers, they are themselves. In fact, the group we are paying attention to is the part of the farmers who left the arable land first, or part of them.They have created a magnificent modern market myth on the land that their ancestors have cultivated for generations.

They are our fellow countrymen, our fathers and brothers, and our contemporaries. They are farmers, farmers who run markets, farmers from Zhejiang. On the land of more than 100,000 square kilometers in Zhejiang, they have established 5,000 professional markets and cultivated nearly 100 supporting markets outside the province.They spread a sentence throughout China: "To set up a market, look at Zhejiang." It is also this sentence that allowed them to assemble themselves into the most famous group of farmers. We are looking for a farmer, in fact, we are approaching a dream that is being realized.

In a broader sense, the farmers we are concerned with are a microcosm of the hundreds of millions of Chinese farmers who are changing their destiny in the East. During such interviews and follow-ups, these farmers and the changes they are undergoing are often beyond our current knowledge and understanding.It was not until a long time later that we gradually developed a new feeling: maybe what we are looking for is the whole of an entrepreneurial era, and its spirit has been projected into the lives of every practitioner of it. They are the most practical people, and it is the times and life that force them to "evolve" into the current state.Their expressions told us again and again, if you really want to ask, then ask about the times and life. Of course, they won't speak so politely, but they have that kind of meaning written on their faces. But, for now, however, let us try to tell their legend.