Original Copy compiles interviews conducted in 2018 and 2021 with Guangzhou-based traders from Cameroon, Uganda, Senegal, Biafra, Chad, Mali, Gabon, and the Ivory Coast. The portrait of a disparate community of African traders is unprecedented in China. With the global Covid crisis and the closing of China's borders in 2020, it is also the end of an exceptional period whose last moments and brutal management by the Chinese authorities are recorded in this book.