For sale: everything. goat-leather motorcycle jackets, Italian bathroom sinks, hand-made violins, longcase clocks, colonial-style desks, Jaguars, diapers. And that's barely getting started. It takes about two days to explore () With 230 escalators, more than 1,000 shops, restaurant space the size of two football fields, and a skating rink – the Art Deco mall is a testament in glass and steel to the communist party's desire to create a stable, happy, middle-income consumer class.

Golden Resources has not attracted a large foreign crowd yet either, mostly because of the mall's location in northwestern Beijing outside of Third Ring Road — far from the city's foreign enclaves. I did not see a single foreign face or hear a foreign language in the hour and a half I spent shopping that Sunday afternoon. Moreover, none of the stores I visited accepted foreign credit cards. In contrast, in many stores at the Oriental Plaza and China World malls in the center of the city, no one bats an eye when a customer hands over a Visa card from a foreign bank.〔

From the beginning we wanted the largest shopping center in the world () We are the country with the most people in the world. We have the fastest growing economy. The largest mall shows our progress as a society () We think it will take three to five years to start making a profit.〔