As you may have noticed the pictures in the last blog posts were of quite poor quality. I want to apologise for this and this post will still have poor images. The reason for this is that my camera broke and I had to use my (old) phone. However, this is also the reason why the metro station of this post is Donghu!
Read about a photographer’s paradise in Guangzhou!
Donghu, 东湖站 in Chinese, is on Line 6. Coming from Zhujiang New Town you will need to take the Line 6 to Yangji where you change to line 1. Take this line to the next station Dongshankou, where you can change to line 6, Donghu being the next station. Once you arrived there, just take take the exit B2.
You should come out of this exit.
On one side you will find the main road and a park behind (to which I will come later) and on the other side there is a small street with some shops. You will find a lot of interesting markets on the way to the photography street, which is also called Shengxian market. But if you’re just after the photography, just follow the way as marked on this map:
The Photography market is marked in red, while the way from the B2 exit is marked by the dotted line
On one side of the street you will find a little shopping mall which sells second hand camera equipment on the outside. In the inside of the shopping however, you will find a lot of other second hand electronics, mainly cell phones, and on the upper floors laptops. Most stores also offer repairs.
Second hand laptops can be bought for as low as 1000 RMB.
The shopping is definitely worth a look. Right after the shopping, there are all the photography shops. There are around maybe 15 shops on both sides of of the street.
Here you will find cameras and lenses from the most common brands as Nikon, Canon, Sony or in some shops even high end cameras as from Leica or Hasselblad. You can also find a lot of equipment for filming and products like action cams from GoPro or drones from DJI. And of course most shops also offer equipment as tripods, bags and other stuff I couldn’t even recognise as an amateur photographer.
Some shops sell second hand equipment!
Now, what makes this place such a paradise for photographers is not only the big variety of products, but mostly the insanely low prices. Depending on the model you want to buy, you can usually save several hundred bucks when comparing to the usual retail prices. Usually you will save more on the more expensive products. For instance the price difference for the GoPro Hero action cam wasn’t very high, while you could save around 250 US dollars for a mid range camera as the Canon 70D. In addition, for most shops there’s still room for bargaining. Most cameras will come with an one year guarantee only valid in China, which could be a downside for you.
If you’re interested in buying photography equipment here in Guangzhou I would just recommend you to give this market a look and ask for some reference prices.
Now for the way back, I want to show some pictures of the electronic market I mentioned earlier. It’s just on the way between the photography street and the metro exit and seems to offer a lot. I will probably go there again and write a more detailed article about it, hopefully equipped with a new camera 🙂 But you can mainly find a lot of professional audio systems, TVs and usual consumer electronics and accessories.
Last but not least I gave the park on the other side of the metro exit a look. Again I will probably go there again and write more about it. Until then get a little taste of it!
Credits go to Life of Guangzhou for helping me to find this place!
Guangzhou 