Making the Marketplace: Traders, Cadres, and Bureaucratic Documents in Lào Cai City

It was a chilly January evening in 2011. Darkness had fallen early over the city of Lào Cai on Vietnam’s northern border with China. The electric heater started circulating warm air as I made myself comfortable with a cup of hot tea and a stack of official reports I had obtained from the management board of Lào Cai’s largest market, the main field site of my research. I was aware that the written administrative records would differ from the complex picture that had emerged from my conversations and interviews with market vendors and management officials over the past three months,