The effect of the influx on Yiwu is visible as soon as you step off the plane, with airport billboards in Arabic and the city boasting the biggest mosque in China, as well as a district full of Middle Eastern restaurants.

Annick Ibrahim, a retailer from Nigeria, discovered the market city three years ago.

"I now come here regularly to buy various products, presents and household items," she said.

"The quality is good because they are used to selling things to Westerners, and prices are much more attractive than European markets."

In the West, China's appetite for Africa's oil and other natural resources has stolen the headlines.

But it is markets such as those in Yiwu that illustrate a greater depth to the trade relationship, as China feeds Africa with an abundance of cheap goods.

Sunda Andre, who works for a goods shop in Angola's capital Luanda and now lives in the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou, says she finds everything she wants in Yiwu.

"Good quality, good prices, we dispatch one container a year," she said.

An annual trade fair in October saw a rise in orders from the Middle East and Africa, according to Li Xuhang, vice-mayor of the city, just as demand from Western and many Asian countries dropped due to the global economic crisis.

As a result, authorities here are now devoting more and more time to emerging countries such as Brazil and Russia as well as Arab and African nations -- and the latter have reciprocated.

Out of 10,000 foreigners living in Yiwu, around 3,000 are from Arab countries, and many others are from Africa, Li said.

Although he had no specific numbers of Africans in Yiwu, Li said at least 300 were from Mauritania.

El Moctar Ould Khalifa is part of the Mauritanian community, and was one of many Africans who came to China to study thanks to scholarships from Beijing.

At the end of the 1990s, as he was studying for a PhD in the Chinese capital, the young man and two Mauritanian friends would earn extra money every year by translating for businessmen at an annual trade fair in Guangzhou.

They then started getting their own contacts, set up fax machines in their university rooms and worked as middlemen between foreign buyers and sellers in China.

In 2000, they moved to Yiwu and launched their own business, an export-import company headquartered in Nouakchott, the capital of Mauritania.

Their made-in-China tea, batteries, textiles and soap are now distributed in the vast majority of west African countries near Mauritania, under their own brand El Hella.

"A lot of Africans came here for counterfeit goods, but we managed to establish our brand... even though it is a little bit more expensive," El Moctar said.

The three associates now have "nice little assets" and dispatched 700 containers to Africa in 2008 from various parts of China -- 160 of which came from Yiwu.

They dream of establishing factories in Africa, but the current situation is not yet secure enough, El Moctar said.

"The workforce (in Africa) might be cheaper, but it poses more problems. Technology and raw materials are also in short supply," he said.

Unlike in Yiwu, where seemingly everything is available, from beach bags meant as souvenirs from the West Indies to a Milanese key-ring or traditional African attire.

Overall, trade between China and Africa grew 45 percent last year to 106.8 billion dollars, and is up from just under 40 billion dollars in 2005.

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