Once I left Ainura’s container-shop on the Dordoi Bazaar in Bishkek, the capital of Kyrgyzstan, I discovered the marketplace eerily quiet. I had no longer spotted the passing of time, whilst she generously shared her existence tale with me.
Strolling in opposition to the mini-bus prevent on the sq. in entrance of the bazaar, the echo of her phrases combined with the end-of-day soundscape at Dordoi: the heavy slam of container-shops’ steel doorways and the resonant clang of heavy padlocks clicking into position.
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A second later, simplest the sound of stray plastic wrappings stirred up by way of the final distributors and consumers heading house, hinted on the day’s bustling task.
Quickly, the cleaners would sweep them down the pathways between the boxes and youngsters would attempt to clutch the recyclables. Answering my query about why she thinks Dordoi is a superb position to paintings, Ainura defined:
Right here in Kyrgyzstan, we will be able to’t depend at the state. Dordoi feeds the rustic. It feeds our households; and it allowed me to start out a brand new existence when I had left my husband.
Ainura is considered one of hundreds of folks – lots of them girls – who discovered a brand new livelihood at Dordoi after existence took an surprising flip. Estimates of folks running there vary from 30,000 to 150,000, relying on whether or not auxiliary jobs, akin to meals hawkers, drivers, packers and carriers are integrated.
In 2025, those numerous financial actions generated kind of US$7.9 million in tax income: a considerable contribution to town’s public funds.
Spanning greater than 100 hectares and constructed from as much as 60,000 double and triple-stacked transport boxes, Dordoi stands as considered one of Kyrgyzstan’s maximum essential financial engines because the nation received independence in 1991.
Dordoi’s primary front in iciness 2021.
Claudia Eggart
Greater than a buying and selling centre, Dordoi is a town inside a town. Past stores and garage areas, it additionally has forex exchanges, scientific centres, a fireplace station, inns, a health club, attractiveness salons and a mosque.
Its liveliness is similarly mirrored within the languages spoken alongside its aisles. Whilst Russian and Kyrgyz stay the languages of trade, Dungan, Uyghur, Uzbek, Tajik, and Chinese language may also be heard, revealing the intensive buying and selling networks that converge right here from throughout Central Asia and past. Buyers promote virtually the rest that may be purchased, packed and shipped – from stitching needles and fridges to automobiles and spare portions.
But clothes stays Dordoi’s lifeblood. Textiles, knitwear and ready-made clothes dominate the business, arriving mainly from China and Turkey along an expanding quantity of in the neighborhood produced attire.
A pair images clothes within a trendy Dordoi retailer for on-line sale.
Claudia Eggart
On the center of the marketplace, the central passageway serves as each a buying groceries street and the bazaar’s primary artery. Cart pushers weave in the course of the crowded aisles, shouting “Jol, jol, jol, jooool, daroga!” (“Make way!” each in Kyrgyz and Russian) as they manoeuvre closely weighted down carts in the course of the throngs of day by day guests.
Threading their manner in the course of the crowds, they ship items to packing stations close to the long-distance bus terminal, the place staff compress products into tightly packed bales and sacks. Each and every centimetre issues within the effort to minimise transport prices.
Via noon, the tempo starts to sluggish. The air fills with the odor of roasting meat and recent dough as meals stalls be offering a culinary map of Central Asia, from Dungan laghman and Uzbek plov to Uyghur samsa.
Carriers at Dordoi have a troublesome task, however the cash is excellent.
Claudia Eggart
Tea distributors, espresso dealers and fruit traders weave in the course of the crowds, whilst – to my very own pleasure – a rising choice of barista espresso stores have transform an more and more visual a part of the marketplace panorama.
I started finding out marketplace biographies in 2018, to start with with a focal point at the feelings eager about shedding a occupation after the cave in of the Soviet Union, but additionally the trauma this is continuously related to the post-Soviet length. In 2019, I prolonged my analysis to incorporate the Dordoi Bazaar in Kyrgyzstan.
Ever since, I’ve returned to Dordoi for prolonged fieldwork in 2021-22, 2024 and 2026. For my dissertation I carried out a comparative find out about of Dordoi and the remarkably an identical container-built seventh Km Marketplace in Odesa, Ukraine.
I’m now turning that analysis right into a e book – Lived Geopolitics – which lines the historical past of each markets from their upward push after the cave in of the Soviet Union to the effects of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
From a fowl’s eye view, each the Dordoi Bazaar and the seventh Kilometer in Odesa seem as huge expanses of corrugated steel.
At flooring degree on the other hand each and every container opens onto its personal distinct social global. That stress between scale and intimacy is what assists in keeping drawing me again. Those markets be offering a novel vantage level from which to discover how non-public histories, aspirations and ethical commitments intersect with summary forces of markets, logistics and international financial and political energy.
Two buyers taking part in chess right through a lull in trade at Dordoi.
Claudia Eggart
My analysis examines how folks make lives, livelihoods and futures inside those intersecting forces and the tactics buyers create wallet of steadiness in spite of ordinary crises and upheaval.
The Soviet cave in
Bishkek’s Dordoi Bazaar is neither an anomaly nor a continuation of the traditional bazaars continuously related to Arab towns. Its origins lie within the cave in of the Soviet Union in 1991, when numerous an identical markets gave the impression around the former socialist global. As factories closed and speedy marketplace reforms driven tens of millions into financial uncertainty, massive numbers of newly unemployed staff have been left to hunt livelihoods within the booming retail sector.
A number of the maximum visual responses to the faltering state economic system was once the proliferation of “shuttle trading”: small-scale cross-border trade by which people – predominantly girls – transported items, continuously in bulk and manually, between websites of acquire and resale. Regardless of the small-scale, handbook persona, trip buyers provided an estimated 75% of client items to post-Soviet nations by way of 1996.
Mannequins coated up alongside a container within the japanese a part of the 100-hectare Dordoi Bazaar.
Claudia Eggart
Olena, one of the most girls I spoke to in Bishkek and a former pharmacist with circle of relatives roots in Ukraine, recalled how she first entered this new global of business within the early Nineteen Nineties.
In the beginning, she ventured to Poland, a deadly and hard one-week shuttle in buses and trains, to shop for items on the Jarmark Europa, Warsaw’s notorious wholesale hub, the place buyers from all throughout former Soviet nations stuffed their baggage for retail again house.
In Poland, Olena had heard of a chance to shop for inventory from a garment manufacturing unit in Indonesia. “It seemed like a once in a lifetime opportunity, so I gathered a group of eight people and we flew to Jakarta,” she stated. On the airport, she remembered, border officers had by no means heard of a rustic referred to as Kyrgyzstan. The passports have been as unfamiliar because the newly impartial state itself. Handiest after repeated journeys did native government start to expand a formalised visa-free access settlement.
Like Olena, tens of millions of advert hoc marketers travelled to unfamiliar locations throughout Turkey, China, the United Arab Emirates and past. They purchased items the place they have been reasonable and plentiful, then carried them again to resell at house. Those huge casual networks turned into an impressive engine of what students have referred to as “globalisation from below”, integrating previously deliberate economies into international markets in the course of the on a regular basis mobility and resourcefulness of abnormal folks.
Two girls in container.
Claudia Eggart
In this day and age, at wholesale hubs just like the seventh Km Marketplace or on the Dordoi Bazaar, items arrive by means of shipment corporations. Provide chains have transform extra complicated, with costs and accessibility being ever extra risky in instances of pandemics and wars.
Dordoi’s intensive succeed in additionally makes business networks extremely delicate to shifts in price lists, alternate charges and financial prerequisites in its primary industrial spouse nations, which come with however don’t seem to be confined to Russia, Kazakhstan and China.
In contrast backdrop of volatility, a central query has guided my analysis: how have native marketers controlled to stay their companies working, and with them the marketplace itself, in spite of ordinary crises and lengthy status predictions of the markets’ decline?
‘Made in Kyrgyzstan’
One such second of disaster got here with Kyrgyzstan’s accession to the Eurasian Financial Union (EAEU) in 2015. The Russian-led bloc, comprising Russia, Kazakhstan, Belarus, Armenia and Kyrgyzstan, was once designed to create a commonplace marketplace bearing in mind the unfastened motion of products, folks and knowledge. For Kyrgyzstan, club intended aligning exterior import price lists with EAEU regulations.
This shift disrupted present low tariff preparations with China – the supply of kind of 3 quarters of products bought at Dordoi. Inside a 12 months, Damira Doolotaliyeva, the marketplace’s business union chief, reported a turnover drop of no less than 80%. Some media retailers went as far as to warn that the cave in of Dordoi would quantity to a humanitarian disaster.
It was once right through this era of uncertainty that Ainura, then in her early 30s, rented her first container. She nonetheless remembers the anxiousness amongst Dordoi’s buyers on the time. “But what choice did I have?” she asks.
I had left my husband, bought my folks’ area in southern Kyrgyzstan and moved to Bishkek with my two babies and my mom.
The primary years have been tricky for her. “There were no customers,” she remembers. “Every day I prayed that I would sell just a few pieces. I had debts to repay, and I knew that a single wrong decision, a delayed delivery, or an unpaid order could push me into bankruptcy.”
After round 3 years, she started to respire extra simply. Via 2018, Ainura had constructed a strong shopper base amongst wholesale buyers from Russia and Kazakhstan, who valued her number of imported undies from Turkey. As her trade grew, she invested in a small garment workshop, bringing her mom and different feminine kinfolk into the undertaking, following a development commonplace around the all of a sudden increasing “Made in Kyrgyzstan” garment sector.
The field flourished at the again of low price lists on imported uncooked fabrics and an plentiful provide of professional, low cost labour. Lengthy related to reasonable, low-quality items it more and more emerged as a key pillar of the nationwide economic system after Kyrgyzstan joined the EAEU.
Simply as Ainura’s trade was once gaining momentum, the pandemic struck. But opposite to expectancies that business would cave in underneath lockdown prerequisites, many samoposhiv (interprets to ‘self sewn’) manufacturers fared rapidly neatly or even reported document gross sales right through the pandemic. As soon as mobility restrictions have been presented, orders got here in massive volumes via WhatsApp or Telegram, thus reflecting a broader international flip towards virtual platforms and e-commerce.
All through my fieldwork in 2022, one girl even remarked, part jokingly, “Oh if only there was still a pandemic!” Many argued that in the neighborhood produced clothes now compete in taste and high quality with international manufacturers akin to Zara or Max Mara.
For Ainura, it intended her Telegram channel grew from 30 to three,000 fans inside days, and orders adopted simply as rapid. She invested her whole financial savings in uncooked fabrics and labored at complete capability to satisfy the surge in call for.
Ainura’s tale additionally speaks to the talent and willingness to take dangers that characterise most of the girls marketers I’ve met through the years.
She drew my consideration to one thing else as neatly: the monetary independence that Dordoi made conceivable was once, for lots of, a way of leaving abusive relationships and rebuilding their lives.
Two girls chat outdoor their marketplace stalls.
Claudia Eggart
Whilst she requested me to stay the intimate main points of her personal revel in personal, she inspired me to put in writing a couple of other size of the bazaar: that, in spite of its hardships, it may be an empowering area the place girls earn the assets had to enhance themselves and their kids.
A complete global in miniature
Since rising amid the socio-economic and political upheaval of the early Nineteen Nineties, Dordoi has prospered by way of occupying the distance between main financial spheres – maximum particularly China, Russia and Turkey.
This place has created a chance construction by which buyers take advantage of variations in availability, laws and costs throughout borders. Those geopolitical distinctions are mapped onto the marketplace itself via sections referred to as Europe and China. But those labels represent much less about geography than about worth. Evropa (Europe) is house to buyers promoting higher-end items, continuously, regardless that no longer completely, textiles labelled “Made in Turkey.” The distinction displays a broader hierarchy of worth.
Evropa inspires high quality and better costs, whilst Kitai (China) refers back to the global of shirpotreb: affordable, industrially produced client items dispensed at scale by way of Chinese language wholesalers and Kyrgyz shops.
However those classes are some distance from fastened. Zoja, one of the memorable marketplace characters whose age is not possible to wager, informed me:
The bazaar is a miniature model of the arena we are living in, and Kitai has lengthy surpassed Evropa.
As we stroll down the bazaar’s central pathway she weaves nonchalantly left and proper signalling in opposition to other marketplace sections and their position within the wider internet of marketplace members of the family. I’m suffering to stay tempo as she strikes in the course of the bazaar’s aisles with the benefit of any person who’s each fully at house and reasonably above where, greeting distributors right here and there whilst slightly slowing her stride. Her hair was once immaculately blow dried, her nails freshly achieved, a hint of costly fragrance enveloped me as we walked to her container.
Zoja’s container is in contrast to maximum others. It sits in a secluded nook of Dordoi, the place entrances are hidden at the back of heavy curtains that block the view from passing eyes. The impact is surprising because it creates a shocking sense of intimacy amid the bazaar’s consistent bustle.
Situated within the very centre, this row is broadly understood because the position “where real money is made” – an remark uttered in a wistful tone when talking with the ones whose trade is in additional far off spaces, and reluctantly showed by way of those that have been fortunate sufficient to sit down within the thick of it.
Like its proprietor, the container is meticulously curated. The whole thing seems sparsely selected, sublime and costly.
Zoja’s container deluxe.
Claudia Eggart
As I settle onto a at ease chaise longue, I commentary at the strangely subtle internal. Zoja smiles faintly and asks whether or not markets like Dordoi exist in Germany. Without a doubt, she muses, stores in Europe will have to be much more sumptuous than hers? Then, quite rapidly, she says with a virtually comfortable undertone: “But you know, I wouldn’t like to give up my dvatsattonnyk.” Dvatsattonnyk, interprets to “20-tonner”, nevertheless it in fact refers back to the 20ft measure of the usual transport container, no longer its weight.
I requested Zoja if she knew how she turned into a success? Did she have an intuition for long run tendencies? However the query itself in an instant marked me as an interloper. “Only someone new to this business would call it luck or intuition,” Zoja driven again.
I’ve labored onerous, concept giant and deliberate long run. Due to this, my circle of relatives has excellent automobiles, great properties and we will be able to are living neatly in Kyrgyzstan. However it isn’t simple to get there.
Since gaining independence in 1991, Kyrgyzstan has skilled repeated political upheavals, together with fashionable uprisings, adjustments of presidency and classes of ethnic violence. Those episodes, mixed with ordinary financial crises, have created an atmosphere of continual uncertainty for companies and families alike.
In contrast background, Zoja got here to the realization that “only a container of my own could secure a stable income”. Dordoi’s boxes are a humorous factor. Greater than buying and selling areas, they serve as as property in their very own proper.
Relying on location, they’re traded for neatly over US$150,000 (£118,000), producing source of revenue no longer simplest via business however via subletting as neatly. Via 2023, top boxes fetched up to US$250,000, and per month rents reached US$3,000. Via April 2026, costs had fallen to between US$80,000 and $150,000. Buyers hyperlink this drop to the broader results of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. When call for from Russia slows, Dordoi feels it briefly. This displays how risky the trade truly is.
Identical to in different city environments, inequalities at Dordoi are stark. Whilst marketers like Zoja spend sums related to the cost of a indifferent area in a fascinating district of Bishkek, many combat to have enough money rents available in the market’s much less winning corners. However those inequalities have produced their very own variations. Location is the whole thing. Some boxes are shared between a number of marketers, whilst others transfer many times searching for better-connected rows and better footfall.
A shop within the Junghai Marketplace, a Chinese language ruled a part of Dordoi the place family home equipment and electronics are bought.
Claudia Eggart
One dealer informed me her circle of relatives bought their house right through the pandemic to shop for a container and rebuild their trade. Others spent years running in another country, continuously in Russia, saving sufficient to safe a spot in Dordoi’s dense industrial community. Regardless of all insecurities, Dordoi, as Ainura put it, “gives us hope, hope that we can build something here”.
Executive modernisation force
That prevailing sense of hope has not too long ago been unsettled. In April 2026, President Sadyr Japarov summoned Askar Salymbekov to ship a public reprimand: the marketplace’s iconic “container empire” had didn’t modernise.
Salymbekov, 71, is the person who had purchased the land and put the primary boxes to construct what has become the biggest retail hub in Central Asia. Wondering whether or not the long-serving proprietor had grown “old and stingy,” Japarov argued that the bazaar will have to have way back been redeveloped into a swish complicated like those he had observed in “Dubai or Istanbul”.
Whilst his declare that years spent labouring in cramped container stores can take a toll on buyers’ well being isn’t unfounded, difficult Salymbekov moves at a gentle nerve. Because the founding father of considered one of Kyrgyzstan’s maximum colourful financial engines, he is regarded as one thing corresponding to a countrywide hero. But even so, in a society the place deference to elders is the norm, such remarks lift immense weight, if no longer possibility.
Japarov’s ultimatum arrived in opposition to the backdrop of a booming economic system. Kyrgyzstan recorded a staggering actual GDP enlargement price of eleven.1% in 2025.
On the other hand, western analysts were sceptical about this surge and warn that the expansion is fuelled by way of complicity in Russia’s efforts to evade sanctions, and warning that such charges are unsustainable.
Regardless, the present executive sees this second as a pivotal alternative to shed the picture of a deficient, landlocked, mountainous country and reposition itself as a central node in China’s Belt and Street Initiative.
As a number of gigantic warehouse complexes are deliberate via co-funding from the Silk Street Fund, Japarov’s imaginative and prescient of reworking Dordoi right into a semi-digitalised, futuristic retail hub starts to appear much less like mere ostentation and extra like an formidable however no longer not possible technique.
Lengthy are living Dordoi!
At Dordoi nowadays, long run and previous collide. Whilst the marketplace clings to archaic traditions, like burning juniper to push back unhealthy spirits, it’s concurrently being reshaped by way of virtual platforms.
A brand new era of baiery (Russian for consumers) not rents bodily boxes; as a substitute, they act as intermediaries, sourcing items from Dordoi to promote them by means of Instagram, or Russian-led on-line marketplaces like Ozon or Wildberries.
Saturday at Dordoi’s central boulevard.
Claudia Eggart
Aiza, one such baier, explains the attraction of this type: “Before, costumers from Russia and Kazakhstan came to us, but since the pandemic they prefer to buy online.”
But, even this virtual evolution stays tethered to the bodily bazaar; with out strolling the flooring to search out and make a selection items, e-commerce can’t serve as. So Dordoi, in the interim, maintains its distinctive place as “the region’s largest showroom,” – a metaphor many state with pleasure.
This hybrid fact demanding situations the view of bazaars as mere relics of a transitional generation. Critics continuously brush aside their informality, specifically relating to taxation and highbrow belongings, as a failure to modernise.
However Dordoi buyers additionally take me back to the fact that the consideration between the casual and formal economic system is quite ambiguous and rarely distinctive to Central Asia, or “do multinational businesses in Germany pay as much taxes as they should?” as some requested.
The problem isn’t whether or not casual markets have compatibility a western best of order. It’s what their survival methods let us know about making money amid capitalist crises and geopolitical ruptures.
On this sense, Ainura’s tale, like many others I encountered right through years of analysis at Dordoi, don’t seem to be outstanding. They level to the wider theory of staying power via adaptation.
Buyers frequently recalibrate to moving laws, fluctuating business routes, converting client call for and periodic financial shocks. In doing so, they supply what a proper economic system continuously can’t – services and products, paintings, credit score and sensible types of enhance that reach some distance past the act of shopping for and promoting.
However Dordoi issues for one thing extra fascinating than its survival economies. Its importance lies in its capability to coordinate financial existence throughout a limiteless community of buyers, providers, transporters and consumers whilst on the similar time, each and every container gives a glimpse into the tactics by which abnormal folks produce a way of conviviality and steadiness in a global more and more adversarial to each.
I used to be on my manner out when Ainura referred to as after me. I grew to become again and she or he stated: “We really like to work here… We love Dordoi.”
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