You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm Elise Hugh. So often we think of places like Silicon Valley or New York City as places of innovation and invention. But coder and writer Shao Wei Wang challenges that conventional wisdom in their talk from Ted Monterey in 2021. They introduce us to the

careful, thoughtful innovation happening in rural areas by taking us to the Chinese countryside.

So what you're seeing here are pearl ponds in rural Juryang.

And on the day that I visited, the owner of these ponds was surprised that anyone outside of her town,

let alone the pearl farming business, would want to know more about these ponds.

70% of the world's pearls are cultured and produced here. And so each of these mussels, they contain 40% of the world's pearls are cultured and produced here.

And so each of these mussels, they contain 40 to 50 pearls.

And the higher-end ones are taken out, sold as jewelry,

and the lower-end pearls are actually extracted,

put into smaller oysters, vacuum-sealed, preserved in formaldehyde,

and shipped off all the way to places like rural Indiana

for online pearl parties,

where thousands of people sit watching these oysters

being cracked open in real time.

Online pearl parties are truly an internet-enabled phenomena,

growing out of platforms like Facebook and Instagram.

Because on the internet, no one can tell just how bad these oysters smell.

When we think of tech, we often think of cities, places like San Francisco or Xinjin,

where tech is built and visibly part of everyday life.

Rarely do we think of the countryside, and when we do, it's as a place that's lacking

tech, that's lacking digital media literacy, and we see the rural as backward.

Yet, the pearl-producing towns of Zhugeang

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