As dawn broke over the morning market in Taihe, vendors bringing hairy wares from across China haggled with dozens of buyers, and tempers frayed.
"We have to bargain for hair," said buyer Liu Yanwen, 35, who sported a buzzcut and arrived at the market at 5.30 am in search of deals.
"We have a factory where we'll turn it into products for export overseas," he added, clutching a head's worth of straight, thick black locks.
Prices can go as high as 5,400 yuan ($880) per kilogram for cuts of 20 inches.
Taihe, in the eastern province of Anhui, is home to more than 400 companies processing human hair into an array of curly extensions, wigs and other products which end up on heads in the United States, Europe and Africa.
Fu Quanguo, 64, pioneered the trade in the 1970s and now sports a crop of white hair. "We used to collect the human hair locally," he said. "But now it comes from all kinds of countries, Myanmar, Vietnam, countries like that.
China exported nearly 75 per cent of the world's "bird skin, feathers, artificial flowers, human hair" products, in 2012, according to the World Trade Organization's International Trade Centre.
The humble hair markets, ramshackle workshops and factories dotting the cornfields of Taihe generated $88 million of exports in 2012, nearly half the county's total, according to the local government.
It is one of many "industrial clusters" -- areas specialising in a single kind of product, which have sprung up in recent decades as China's export economy has boomed.
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