This week­end we made a trip to the watch mar­ket to get the DiploMan’s watch fixed and see if I could find myself a spare watch (among the errands we were running).

Find­ing a spare watch was prob­a­bly not the best gen­eral state­ment when wan­der­ing around the watch mar­ket in Guangzhou– there were lit­er­ally tens of thou­sands of watches to choose from, dis­played in counter after counter of glass cases. Watches piled upon watches, upon even more watches. Shock­ingly, I was able to find one that I liked pretty quickly, and after an unsuc­cess­ful attempt at bar­gain­ing (ven­dors gen­er­ally don’t bar­gain here, at least not until you buy more than fifty of what they’re try­ing to sell).

Inter­est­ingly, when laid out on dis­play, the ven­dors have fake fakes (yeah, you heard me.) — brands that were specif­i­cally designed to show­case the style and design of the watches, but not to sell. Once a watch is cho­sen, the real imi­ta­tion is dug out from the back.

After a very con­fus­ing five min­utes of me almost buy­ing the fake fake, our watch lady finally explained that if caught even dis­play­ing a coun­ter­feit brand, a ven­dor would receive a 30,000rmb penalty. She stealth­ily uncov­ered a coun­ter­feit logo on the under­side of the watch strap, taped over to hide from any­one ready to fine her. Not exactly the most inge­nious of dis­guises, but it worked– after all, we didn’t even notice the lit­tle strip of cam­ou­flaged tape hid­ing the watch’s true fake identity.

Why she showed this to us, I have no idea. What if we were undercover?

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