At the Huaqiangbei Market in Shenzhen, you can build a smartphone from scratch in a couple of hours.

Axar.az reports citing CNN.

Spread over several floors and covering hundreds of thousands of square feet, the market is home to vendors selling the parts that make up your standard phone — cameras, motherboards, frames, screens and so on. All you have to do is buy the right bits and know how to put them all together.

And it's not just smartphones. You can find the parts here for almost any consumer electronics device you can think of, like portable power banks and drones.

To be sure, there is copycatting going on here. The designs of Apple (AAPL) or Samsung devices are regularly ripped off. Intellectual property rights, one of the US government's biggest bugbears with China, are nonexistent. But there's invention at work, too. Some people are trying to use the parts to come up with new and improved versions of existing gadgets.

The whirling, chaotic market highlights how innovation sometimes works in China. Experts say viewing the country as just a vast manufacturing base for products designed by foreign companies is outdated and misguided.