Qingping Market is one of the first "free markets" spawned by Deng Xiaoping's economic policies, where peasants could sell their produce. It is one of Guangzhou's most important and controversial landmarks.
Here, tourists choose an animal they like, buy it, kill it themselves or give it to a chef, make a meal out of it and eat it here. Near the entrance is the usual collection of medicinal herbs, spices, dried scorpions, snakes, skins of leopards and tigers, poisonous mushrooms, bark of trees of different species. Then there are the live animals: monkeys, turtles, owls and pigeons, fish tanks, frogs, toads and salamanders, anteaters, dogs and raccoons.
