On a Friday evening in Wuhan, Hubei province, warm yellow lights begin to flicker on under the plane trees along Lihuangpi Road in Jiang'an district, lighting a stretch of market stalls. The air is filled with the aroma of coffee. A young couple crouches in front of a stall, carefully opening a bright yellow blind box. Inside lies a piece of turquoise.
"It feels like you've dug it up yourself!" says Ma Tianyu, the 24-year-old vendor. This is the Youth Market on Lihuangpi Road, a 604-meter-long stretch built in 1900.
Ma was nervous when she first set up her stall in September 2023. A junior at China University of Geosciences (Wuhan), she had tried cross-border livestreaming. When her teacher suggested trying the newly launched Youth Market on Lihuangpi, she gave it a shot, with just half a stall.
That day, she sold crystals, rough stones and mineral specimens. "I went home with a hoarse throat," she recalls. When she counted the day's earnings — over 4,000 yuan — Ma was stunned.
In August 2024, Ma and her partner, Han Yue, moved into a second-floor studio in the neighborhood.
The two young women sell mineral blind boxes and crystal accessories. "We used to sell 'see-through' mineral boxes — transparent, everything visible. People would pick them up, look, and put them down," Ma says. One day, a visitor stared at the box for a long time and said, "If it were a blind box, I might actually buy one."
She and Han took the suggestion. Within two weeks, the "see-through" box became a bright yellow blind box, printed with the words, "A letter from the earth". On its first day, all the boxes sold out.
Ma is one of hundreds of young entrepreneurs who have found success in the Youth Market on this historical street.
Zhang Jinfeng, 33, is one of those who found her footing here. She has been making leather goods for 11 years since she moved from southwestern Sichuan to Wuhan in 2015, after stumbling upon a video of an overseas craftsman. She then bought tools and leather and taught herself.
In 2022, she joined the Youth Market (on trial then) on Lihuangpi Road for the first time. It poured that day. As she scrambled to cover her leather goods — rain is leather's enemy — a customer told her not to worry and she would wait in a nearby coffee shop. When the rain stopped, the customer returned and bought a bag.
"There's a rhythm to commercial markets — fast in, fast out," she says. "But Lihuangpi Road is different. People slow down."
"My leatherwork takes hours, sometimes days, to complete. It is a slow business, and I have found many customers here appreciate that," she says. In April 2025, she moved her studio from Huangpi to a second-floor space right above her Lihuangpi Road market stall.
"If a customer sees my bags for the first time at a stall, they might hesitate. But if I bring them upstairs to see my workspace, choose the leather, and watch me work, I build trust," she explains.
Zhang stands by her second-floor window, looking down at the street below. "This is a street that makes you, almost without realizing it, slow down," Zhang says. "And when you look around, everyone is smiling."
Ma Tianyu also likes to glance out her own window when work gets tiring. "It refreshes me," she says. "Lihuangpi Road is where my dream started, and it will be where my dream continues."