Why go there at all? It's strictly or tourists.

Why not go to the market opposite the zoo, which is where the merchants at Silk Market get their stuff anyway.

Also, you won't get any "Loo-y look-y!" "You want buy socks?" "Hey handsome man (or beautiful girl)!" etc.

Or people actually grabbing you.

Don't know. Go to the zoo. Cross the road. There's a big bus station there. Go through the bus station. Turn right. Walk 20 or so metres. There are two markets- one on your left and one on your right.

In the mornings buyers from the Silk Market are there loading up their vans.

Silk market is good place if you are tourist seeking for souvenir, they offer clothes which look in "Chinese" style very much. The suitable price is 1/6 of what they charge for.

Zoo(动物园服装批发市场) is for 老北京,e.g.Remmy

My rule is offer 10%, go as high as 15%. Walk away. If they don't take it at 15%, you go somewhere else and start at 10%, go as high as 20%. There are always multiple people selling the same product, so you have some leeway with this.

The silk market is a tourist trap, but they all speak English, and if you are traveling from out of the country, it's still cheap as hell.

I bought a Wii game there though last time and it didn't work.

I have been to the Silk Market many times since the 1990s but in recent years, I despise going there. The sellers have become extremely rude and insulting. No matter what you do- whether you ask the price before examining the item, or examine the item before asking price, they will still generally curse you with rude swears in English if you chose not to buy the item.

I strongly recommend NOT shopping at the Silk Market or Yashow. Go instead to the Zoo clothing market where the goods are the same, and the sellers are generally polite and nice.

At the Silk Market, the seller's rude attitudes must surely be a result of their owner/bosses encouraging them to curse potential customers in an attempt to intimidate and pressure them into parting with their money. I strongly recommend boycotting such planned nastiness. By encouraging this type of crude behavior, the owner/bosses also damage the minds/personas of the young girls who work as sellers in the place. Nobody would chose to be a nasty person. It is the marketing-methods that the boss encourages that influences and transforms the sellers into rude people who lack respect for everything other than money.

The Silk Market is a sad place- its a distilled version of everything that is wrong with China: obsession with money and glorification of money over everything else including respect for other human beings, employing village girls at a crappy salary and make them behave in dehumanizing ways so that the owner/bosses can get rich.

Overall, the Silk Market is disgusting and dehumanizing for everyone involved (except for the owner/bosses who get rich from this system).

In Beijing, there are many low cost, nice places to shop with pleasant and polite seller/clerks. Let's patronize those shops instead.

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When I first came to Beijing I had a Chinese friend suggest that I drop a decimal point with every price offered to me, at the time I thought that sounded cheap and insulting, but have learned since then that I have saved a ton of money.

Then you're getting ripped of my friend You often can get away with paying less than 10% of what their asking price. Don't feel cheap, if they don't make a profit they won't sell it to you, just go to another stall which offers the same crap.