The Dordoi bazaar near Bishkek, capital of Kyrgyzstan, looms out of the muddy Central Asian steppe like a shabby moon base. Like a weird modular fortress. Like a sly architectural pun.
If a chicken farm were to be tucked inside a giant egg, or if a funeral parlor were to operate from within a casket, you would approach the bizarre poetry of Dordoi—one of the largest open-air markets in Asia built almost entirely from perhaps 30,000 recycled shipping containers. Nobody knows how many of the 40-foot-long metal shipping crates, designed to haul freight from one corner of the Earth to the other, are collected today at Dordoi. The tally grows daily. Some parts of the hundred-acre market feature container “skyscrapers” that totter three stories high. Each unit has been recycled into a shop, a warehouse, a restaurant, a makeshift greenhouse, an auto garage, a toilet, and even a sort of post office. Dordoi has its own graveyard and mosque. It is a new Silk Road caravanserai sculpted from rusty cubes. It is a temple to profit. Merchandise and housing harmonize.
“Ah, this place won’t last another 10 or 15 years,” huffs Sanam Tadjybaeva, a hard-bitten shopkeeper whose lamp store sparkles like a treasure cave of cut glass inside a cramped shipping container. “Big malls will eventually come to Kyrgyzstan. Civilization will be the end of Dordoi.”
Dordoi was born amid the feral capitalism of the immediate post-Soviet era.
In the freewheeling chaos of the 1990s, as Central Asia’s borders hardened and new currencies sprang up, Kyrgyz entrepreneurs saw a chance to leverage their nation’s crossroad geography as a trading post between China and Europe. Dordoi grew from a handful of containerized shops plunked in scrubby fields near the Kazakh border to the colossus it is today: the ultimate box store with thousands of independent merchants plying their trade in a maze of container-hemmed alleyways. One study estimates that as many as 150,000 people live directly or indirectly off of Dordoi. Billions of dollars in commerce stream annually through its steel-walled shops stenciled with the names of maritime and railroad freight companies.
“Buyers and sellers come from Russia, Uzbekistan, Kyrgyzstan. Kazakhstan and China,” says Yuri Selezner, a sheepskin merchant who, unlike most containerized traders at Dordoi, works out of an old Soviet-era truck. “They stay or go depending on the strength of their money. Only the Chinese stay all the time.”
What do customers buy?
The products are mostly Chinese made, of course, but they also come from Turkey, Southeast Asia, the United States, and Europe. Each container-shop sells a particular commodity: car parts, animal skins, electric guitars, marinated mushrooms, brassieres, medicinal herbs, surveillance cameras, goggled-eyed fish from Lake Issyk Kul, an exhausting variety of knit caps, and infinitely more. Indeed, perhaps 99 percent of the material culture of humankind at the turn of the 21st century is available for sale at Dordoi. You could buy happiness and plutonium there too if you knew which containers sold them.
“What we have that big city stores don’t is the human touch,” explains Dastan Muratov, a seller of Chinese guitars. Muratov is bundled in ski pants and parka. Dordoi is an icebox in winter. “You can have a conversation with a client, you can talk, negotiate, make an emotional connection.” Muratov pauses to stare hard-eyed at some boys fingering his guitars.
And the key to success at Dordoi? It is the same all over the world, Muratov says, nodding. Choose a corner container. Start small.
