Beijing - Shopping

Hi folks,

anyone have any good tips on what to buy / not to buy in Beijing. My folks are heading over after christmas and are looking for lists.

Cheers

A bicycle???

Pearls perhaps?

IRELAND ON SUNDAY SEPTEMBER 18 2005 BY RONALD QUINLAN.

Bertie and ex-girlfriend refuse to say if they were given cut price jewellery to promote Chinese store.

BERTIE AHERN and CELIA LARKIN were last night at the center of a potentially damaging mystery over cut-price Chinese pearls.

During an official state visit to Beijing the taoiseach and his former lover posed for a photograph in an up market store that is known to sell pearls and other jewellery to VIPS at heavilly discounted prices.

Click to expand...

they have all the fake designer stuff in the markets. Chinese porcelain is really nice also, really cute tea-pots and stuff in the smaller shops in the old area of Beijing, can't remember name of the area sorry!

tea. rice.bamboo

Silk Market is good. Two or three stops from Tiananmen square. There is a subway stop in the basement. Can't remember exact stop but I'm sure any guide book would have the address.

5 or 6 storey building with clothes, souvenirs, jewellery, bags, etc. Most of it fake. Lacquerwear goods, paper cuts are nice.

Make sure to haggle hard. 20 to 30% of the asking price. Walk away if the price is too much. You'll get a call back in lots of cases. Most of the large department stores have same designer labels as here and for similar prices. Department store prices are pretty much set.

When converting money try to get small domination notes. There is lots of fake currency in circulation. Anything over a 20RMB note should be checked carefully. I believe there are smaller domination forgeries as well but probably not so many as 20s and 50s.

John

Couple of things that I picked up.

1. Go to the eyeglasses market if you are looking for frames. Bring your prescription. Frames are like 10 euro the lenses are about the same unless you need the really thin glass (if you are like -7.00 or something) and there are 4 floors of choice
http://www.thebeijingguide.com/shopping/eyeglasses.html

2. The silk market is packed full of fakes. The shirts arent bad. shoes are very poor quality but are ok. As for haggling, be very agressive verbally. If they ask for 600 yen, you should be getting them down to about 100. Jeans should cost about 80 yen, no more. we spent a long time in china and nowhere did we see markups like beijing. For example a guy tried to sell me a mao watch for 150 yen. I got it for 25 yen.

3. Tea is excellent. Again watch out for scammers, go into a proper tea shop and haggle as if you are in the silk market.

4. Panjiayuan antique market on sunday is good but most of the stuff is crap. They are very shrewd and its so popular that if you haggle properly they wont sell it to you because there are so many dumb tourists paying ridiculous prices, they know that they can get a better price from an unsuspecting tourist!!

The haggling is great craic, if you are in the mood for it. The pearls there are quite suspect. We went into a pearl market with loads of sellers and I couldnt see the difference. They put a torch under the pearl to show that its real (it aparently doesnt mark), but its very unconvincing.