Beijing's famous must-see shopping experience for tourists, Xiushui Street Market, is being reorganized to emphasize silk, its premier commodity, as well as enhance the quality of goods for sale and to crack down a fake brand-name products.

According to Beijing Xiushui Clothing Co Ltd, operator of the market, Famous and Old Silk Brands Street and Quality Silk District will be established to provide high-quality silk cloth and garments as well as tailoring services for consumers.

"Both the quality and quantity of our silk products are to be upgraded and expanded, and there will be no counterfeit brand-name commodities here," said Wang Zili, general manager of the company.

Some famous silk stores with more than a century of history, such as Ruifuxiang and Neiliansheng, will also be introduced so "the old Xiushui silk vendors should adjust their commodity structure to meet with the united quality requirements of the market", Wang said. 

Some 90 vendors selling counterfeit Armani, Hugo Boss and Ermenegildo Zegna clothes and accessories have been cleaned out of the market. Their booths will be consolidated into the Quality Silk District.

After reorganization, the Xiushui Market will officially open on July 15 with 196 silk booths to become China's largest silk retailing and service market catering to foreigners.

In anticipation of the change, existing vendors are clearing stock, selling goods at discounts of 70 to 80 percent.

"We were ordered by the market to sell high-quality products and all (others) should disappear, so we are trying to minimize our losses by cleaning out our storage," said a Zhejiang silk vendor who did not want to be named.

"Actually, have they (the Xiuhshui Market operator) thought carefully (about the changes)? Why do consumers come here? They come for affordable and nice silk products instead of those with high-price tags in luxury department stores," he said.

He added that the change caused him to lose hundreds of thousands of yuan.

Wang Zili noted that the market has paid a total of 3 million yuan to vendors as compensation.

"The money is from our 30 million yuan intellectual property right (IPR) protection fund" set up last year, aiming to help build Xiushui from a so-called fake brand-name products hub into a reliable and IPR-qualified market," said Wang.

According to Fan Yanru, deputy secretary-general of the Retail Enterprises Committee of the China Commerce Association for General Merchandise, Xiushui Market is attractive to visitors, especially to foreigners, for its local shopping atmosphere, such as bargaining and affordable prices.

"Of course, business concentration is good to identify Xiushui from other competitors, but the market should in the meantime hold on to its characteristics," said Fan.

Xiushui Market has long been popular with overseas tourists who have flocked there to buy counterfeit luxury clothes and accessories since 1985.

Surrounded by foreign embassies and luxury hotels in the Chaoyang district, the market is ranked as the third best-known tourist site around the capital after the Palace Museum and the Great Wall.

It once drew 100,000 shoppers a day, generating more than 10 million yuan in taxes annually from sales of more than 100 million yuan a year.

The Xiushui company razed the old outdoor market in January 2005, moving the stalls indoors into a new multi-story building.

(China Daily July 4, 2007)