So I’m told if your after electronics or digital products there’s no better place to buy than in Shenzhen, China. This is backed up by the large number of electronics factories in the city, many global brand name products like the Apple iPhone and iPad are copied, I mean made, right here in Shenzhen too. There are many electronics markets in the city too, but lucky me, Susan being a local took me to the number one  place to go electronics shopping in Shenzhen, if not the whole of China.  It’s the Huaqiangbei electronics market area  ( I think they call it Huaqiangbei Commercial Area) and it’s mind bogglingly big, apparently many gadget lovers and techies have entered this area and never been seen again! Just one of the multi-level electronics mega-stores is enough to blow your mind, but the fact that there’s numerous of them sprawling for block after block is just amazing. Each floor of these buildings is packed with hundreds of independant retailers operating out of small stalls, and they’re all competing against each other!

If your not happy with the five massive floors of electronics in that building you can go to this one:Just walk around the corner to this one: And there’s more if that’s not enough! You can find everything in this area of Shenzhen including mobile phones, cameras, gadgets, laptops, pc’s, lcd’s, cables, accessories, batteries from brand names like Canon, Sony, Dell, Apple, Asus etc etc. Homes For Sale By Owner Botkins OhioYou can also find OEM goods and there’s also plenty of brand name copies if you want to take a punt on quality.Puppies For Sale Inmi Interestingly one multi level building is dedicated to small components like resistors, leds, plugs and all sorts of electrical and electronic fittings. Car Ac Repair Dhaka

There’s also whole floors of people selling second hand and recycled goods. If you need your mobile phone, camera or any electronics fixed, it looks like a great place for that too. Believe it or not, I escaped here without buying a thing! I think I was too awestruck! But I’ve got the feeling I’ll be back…. Further along Huaqiang North Road, there’s a Maoye Department Store which has fashion, beauty and home products. There’s also another large department store/market featuring just womens fashion and is appropriately named Womens World, and further along is another Womens World mall, and also a shopping mall just for childrens clothes, toys and the like. Yes, it’s called Childrens World. There’s also a ‘Foreign Trade Market’ which features a large number of market stalls selling mens and womens fashion, lots of knock offs and copies. Its located down a lane way that’s in between KFC and MOI (Maoye). Note, theres also a ‘Foreign Trade Market’ behind SEG but it sells home security and electronics…

Behind SEG, as mentioned, theres also a couple of buildings with stalls selling selling home security products and some selling no-name laptops. There’s also a couple of multi-level buildings dedicated to mobile phones, including copies and originals! If your paying a lot, make sure it’s the real thing, but it probably won’t be! How to get there: take the metro to Huaqiang Lu and walk out Exit A, theres also loads of shops selling clothes and curios inside that metro station. Update: for some more detailed and upto date info check out the Huaqiangbei post at Shenzhen Shopper. Here’s a rough hand drawn map outlining the major stores along Huaqiang North Rd (Huaqiangbei), could be a time saver to help get your bearings on a first visit. For more maps visit the Shenzhen Maps site. Map including location of hotels near and on Huaqiang Bei Lu. Recommended Hotels – (Walk to the market, Clean, Comfortable + English service) Pavilion Hotel and Century Tower – 5 star, located at the northern end of the market area it’s an easy walk to any of the markets.

Huaqiang Plaza Hotel – has a fantastic location, right in the heart of Huaqiang electronics market area. It’s clean and modern, has a reasonably priced buffet restaurant and a Starbucks on the ground floor.It's safe to say that most of our readers are accustomed to phone shops that are well lit, fairly spacious, and not peppered with KIRF products. But if you're feeling adventurous and want to take a dip in the deep end of the pool, then Shenzhen's Huaqiangbei district should satisfy your strange curiosity. As we've shown you in our previous trip, our gadget paradise covers an extensive range of products, including phones, computers, cameras, all the way down to circuitry components like LEDs, chips, and resistors. Our latest discovery, however, is an entire building dedicated to mostly mobile phone products. Read on to find out what this madness is all about -- a video tour awaits after the break. Gallery: Shenzhen mobile phone market: going deeper inside Huaqiangbei | The premises in question is the Yuanwang Digital Mall, which is bang in the middle of Huaqiangbei's high street.

In fact, this is right between the two Meizu stores we visited in January. While the name may sound snazzy to some, Yuanwang's certainly nothing like the ordinary malls that you may have in mind. For starters, you're greeted by a relatively dinky front entrance sandwiched between several small shops, thus giving outsiders the illusion that there's not much going on inside. If you gaze from afar, you could easily mistake the mall as some sort of old office building -- the only indication that says otherwise is the large blue sign above the entrance, so watch out for it when you're in town. According to Yuanwang's official website, the mall houses some 30,000 square meters of retail space between three floors, catering over 100,000 visitors daily while retaining over 60 percent of China's cellphone bulk buyers. That's a pretty bold claim there, but having seen its competitors on the same street, we're convinced that Yuanwang is at least the largest and busiest cellphone mall in the area.To be frank, our first few visits to this then-mysterious place were slightly intimidating.

Upon stepping through the entrance, the first thing we saw were a pair of escalators right in front of us, and above it was a large red banner that went along the lines of "sales of counterfeit goods are prohibited" -- the kind of slogans that are commonly displayed around Huaqiangbei. Like most other electronics malls in the area, Yuanwang's front hall was filled up with little booths selling both genuine and shanzhai phones; nothing extraordinary here, but we quickly learned that this was only the tip of the iceberg. As we walked further in, we ended up in a smaller hall that specialised in phone components: LCDs, batteries, buttons, housings, etc. Dotted along the outskirts were mostly accessories sellers, and likewise along the corridor on the other side but with the addition of several repair workshops. From our observation, it appeared that these repairmen took orders from neighboring shops plus individual customers, so there was plenty of business for them. What amazed us was how these guys could work on these delicate electronics in such a noisy and open environment, as you can see in the photo below.

Oh, and there's no need for them to head out for refreshments -- every now and then you'd bump into a lady offering snacks plus drinks, and some even take orders for hot meal delivery. A repair workshop on the ground floor.Things get a bit wilder on the first floor -- this is essentially the heart of Yuanwang where most of the trading activities take place, involving hundreds of tiny booths that sell finished products in the larger halls. Over the last few weeks we visited the mall during different periods of the day, and there was never a moment without the grating noise of parcel tape being ripped, nor was the floor litter-free. The air was also notably worse than the floor below -- part of the country's 356 million smokers are to be blamed here, and no one's stopping them from taking a puff inside the crowded building. It was apparent that the few ventilation ducts weren't sufficient for the spacious halls, but if you're lucky, the booths may switch on their little clip-on fans. Not that this made us feel any better, mind you -- the combination of bad air and windowless environment kept us from thinking straight, so first-time visitors should definitely go in pairs just to be safe.

Once we got used to the wild scene, we started noticing many familiar devices displayed on the counters. Just to name a few: an astonishing number of iPhone 4s and iPads, many HTC Android phones (especially white Desire S at one point), a good mix of both featurephones and smartphones from Nokia (Symbian^3 still has a strong presence in China), some Motorola Androids here and there, and some of the latest Sony Ericsson Androids. As mentioned earlier, most of the buyers here pick these devices up in bulk for distribution elsewhere -- mainly in other parts of China judging by their dialects, though we also spotted the odd foreigners (or "laowai," as the Chinese call them) along with their interpreters handing over cash to the sellers. A girl inspecting an iPhone 4 while wondering what we're up to.So where do these gadgets actually come from? Well, ask any of these sellers and they're likely to give you two or three prices for some devices, depending on where they originate. For instance, one booth offered two versions of the Sony Ericsson Xperia Play: one from Hong Kong, and one from other countries.

For the former, it's likely that the gadgets were hand-carried across the Hong Kong-Shenzhen border checkpoints, but this requires a bit of work. According to a recent investigation by TVB's News Magazine, the runners or scalpers work in groups to smuggle in the devices and boxes separately, in order to dodge the 10 percent import duty enforced by the Chinese border control. Once the lucky folks reach mainland China, they regroup, repackage the devices, and then pass them on to their dealers in order to collect their dirty money.Speaking of which: each runner gets up to HK$100 (US$13) per iPhone or iPad, for example; but we're not entirely sure how the final profit is split between the original scalper and the shops at Huaqiangbei -- all we know is that currently these Apple devices are sold for between HK$300 (US$40) and HK$700 (US$90) higher than their retail prices. Obviously, this gets more complicated with imports from overseas (usually Europe). These aren't exactly huge numbers, but some runners have gone as far as strapping multiple devices under their clothing and inside their sandals to, uh, maximize their profit per run -- have a look at the M.I.C. Gadget link below and you'll see what we mean.

Empty boxes for refurbished phones?Naturally, not all devices there were brand new. We caught some shops repackaging what were presumably refurbished phones, as well as sticking new labels onto parts and accessories. We're normally cool with buying refurbished goods to save a few pennies, but here in Huaqiangbei, you need to know the game in order to avoid being scammed. That said, it's not that hard once you've explored the site a few times -- these guys just do it in front of you. Hell, we even watched a woman carefully applying fake AT&T-stamped labels onto fake iPhone 3GS boxes, while chatting with us about the then-missing white iPhone 4.But here's what really worried us: some of the booths were peeling old labels off used phone batteries to put on new ones, while the others were slapping shiny "QC approved" stickers onto "SanDisk" microSD cards. Frankly speaking, both sightings immediately killed our gadget lust on the spot. On one hand, it's rather hilarious that all of this happened right in front of our eyes;

but looking from the other side, it makes you wonder who could guarantee the reliability of these random parts, how many of these end up on eBay, and whether the phones were pick-pocketed in the first place. A man peeling original labels off used phone batteries before applying new ones.Enough with the downer; let's move on to the brighter, quieter top floor. Unlike the two levels below, here we have just a collection of closed booths -- a mixture of mainly shanzhai phone distributors and a few repair shops. To be honest, the vast range of phones offered here weren't as exciting as we had anticipated -- most were just tacky handsets with resistive touchscreens, but hey, apparently there's still a market for them somewhere on this planet. For what it's worth, we've noticed recently that some of these dirt cheap devices are starting to appeal to the older generation in Hong Kong, and we guess they sell even better in other parts of Asia and the Middle East. Not that we spotted any foreign buyers here, mind you;