On the Modern Silk Road

Trade as a different way of life

This past month, I came to the Canton Fair in Guangzhou with a lover from Uzbekistan (story for another time). Often, traveling is not as simple as visiting a different geography—it’s witnessing a different economic reality, one that is foreign to those of us in the digital economy.

Canton Fair (广交会) is China’s largest import and export fair, the largest of its kind in the world. Here, I saw a glimpse of the manufacturing prowess behind “made in China.” A vacuum cleaner sells for $8.80 per unit with a minimum purchase of 1,000 units. “How many orders do you want?” “It depends on the price.” Walking the endless halls, I heard the rhythmic churning of food container manufacturing machines and watched pool cleaning robots crawl up and down demonstration tanks. Products span from service robotics and Christmas decorations to ambulance vehicles and ice cream manufacturing machines. And they sell not just the machines, but complete packages—skilled personnel who will accompany a business to their market and train local talent as part of skills transfer.

Canton Fair 2025

Phase 1 (Oct 15–19): electronics, appliances, manufacturing, vehicles

Phase 2 (Oct 23–27): gifts, home décor, furniture, building materials

Phase 3 (Oct 31–Nov 4): textiles, clothing, food, toys.

Bottom: When halls of electronics and vehicles transformed into food and clothing during Phase 3.

I watched people from all nationalities move through the stalls with purpose. There was no small talk, just price negotiations, technical inquiries, and potential business deals. Trade fairs like this are unlike the conferences I’m used to—networking over hors d’oeuvres, panel discussions and presentations few genuinely care to attend. Here, there are only transactions. Relationships and trust are built afterward in the process of actually doing business together. Once an order is fulfilled and a payment made, trust is earned.

It felt like the modern Silk Road—a network of trade routes connecting the East and West, linking China to the Middle East and Europe since Marco Polo times. Despite seeing people of all colors, the fair was dominated by those from Central Asia, India, and Russia, along with a number of Africans and some Europeans and Australians scattered throughout. In the days I was there, I didn’t meet a single American—an absence shaped by our geopolitics, our tariffs, our deliberate distance from this world.

America feels almost sheltered from this world of trade.

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Since the day I met this “Uzbek boyfriend,” he’s been on the phone constantly—in Russian, English, Uzbek, and occasionally Persian. Working means 150 calls a day on average, on the road, walking to the train station, during meals, any time and all the time.

My world in tech operates differently. Working means scheduling a time for a call, sitting at a cafe with a laptop, executing meetings and partnerships over headphones and Zoom calls.

I watched him pull up the Notes app on his iPhone. One section titled “money I need to collect,” another “money I need to pay.” This simple app documents hundreds of thousands of dollars in cash transactions spanning several dozen vehicles. One moment he owes $25,700 to a dealer in Japan; the next, $38,500 for a car is collected completely in cash in Lusaka. And here I am, someone who’s never seen more than $500 in cash at once in my life, watching him casually manage these flows without Excel spreadsheets.

In tech, we burn through cash seeking product-market fit and relentless growth. Efficiency is defined by the cleanliness and scalability of code, user experience metrics, and low customer acquisition costs. In trade, there is only price-market fit and the art of leveraging trust to acquire more products with less upfront payment—negotiating down to 30-50% of full price through relationship building, strategically delaying full payment. Efficiency means shrewdness in price determination and strategic selection of shipment methods, transfer of goods at higher volume, and rotation of capital.

Assemblage of Dongfeng pickup truck, Zhengzhou Nissan Industrial Park.

In the world of trade, physical goods are physical. It’s obvious and yet I had never thought of it that way. In the past month, we stopped in several different cities, each specializing in the production of specific goods: Shenzhen for electronics, Foshan for ceramic tiles, and Zhengzhou for pickup trucks. To purchase goods in China and Japan and then sell them cross-continentally to Zambia and Uzbekistan requires constant movement. It can’t be done sitting in one place.

Trade is not just an industry—it is a way of life.

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On one side of the world, discussions of AI and new software continue. On another, it’s the logistics of container shipments and customs clearance. And the Silk Road continues.

I remember sitting in my apartment in New York City, clicking a button on Amazon or AliExpress and products magically appearing at my door two days later. To an American, trade means policy discussions and tariff percentages, not the reality of the millions of hustlers living on the Silk Road.

The world I’ve known hovers around the Americas, Europe, and perhaps Southeast Asia. Yet this world traverses through Africa, Central Asia, and China.

A friend from the States confided, “I thought that trade is an old industry and there is no money to be made. I didn’t think this world existed.”

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While in Foshan, I came across a showroom of beautiful ceramic tiles I’ve never seen before. Perhaps there is an opportunity to bring these tiles to other corners of the world.

I could invest ~$15,000 to purchase a container. The “Uzbek boyfriend” immediately started to calculate the tonnage a wagon could load—there is a 25-ton limit on a 40-foot container, meaning it can carry about 1,000 square meters of tiles while having extra space on the top to fill with other products, such as the vacuum we saw at the Canton Fair. The numbers run through his mind at light-speed.

Ceramic tiles in Foshan.

I often think that in life, there are different ways to live. I can choose to take a stab at the business of import and export, visiting factories and traveling from city to city. Or I can go back to New York, meet amazing minds, and build something I believe is meaningful. Or perhaps, I can live a combination of both.

In each geography, as my environment shifts, so do my priorities and how I spend time. After 20 days in Asia, what took up my time in New York—exploring the trendiest restaurants, attending a plethora of events and building community, even writing to establish a presence on the Internet—becomes less important. Yet, these things are important in that different reality.

As I sit in a cafe at this very moment typing, I know that no matter which path I choose, I’ll always retain habits from my world, such as this act of working and writing on a laptop everywhere I go.

$25, $35, $55 per square meter. Looking at the catalogue of colorful tiles, I ponder the possibility of embarking on a journey along the modern Silk Road.

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Thank you to friends from Writes of Passage and Essay Club for the ideas and edits: Patrick O’Loughlin, Chris, CansaFis, and Zac de Moor.