How China’s ‘Crystal Capital’ Cornered the Market on a Western Obsession
Villages were looking for niches they could fill in the world market. The city of Xuchang, for example, capitalized on its legacy of making hairpieces for opera performers—and on the willingness of rural women to sell their black ponytails—and turned itself into a hub for wigs. Zhuangzhai became the largest supplier of caskets to Japan, in part due to its proximity to groves of paulownia, a lightweight, slow-burning wood favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. The city of Qiaotou became the button-making capital of the world after three brothers found a handful of fired buttons in a gutter and decided to sell them on, or so the story goes.
Donghai already had a lot of quartz and skilled labor, as well as entrepreneurs who were willing to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Crystal Museum who now runs boot camps for wannabe crystal entrepreneurs, says that in the late 1980s, artisans learned to modify washing machine motors so they could polish crystal necklaces, previously a manual job. When there wasn't enough raw crystal to keep up with demand, manufacturers resorted to glass from beer bottles to make beads. People in Donghai told us that they remember that at one point the shortage became so dire that restaurants and bars ran out of beer.
Around the same time, illegal mining was spiraling out of control. All the digging caused roads to collapse and houses to sink, sometimes leading to injuries and deaths, according to Chinese media. In late 2001, Donghai County authorities warned of an imminent crackdown on unauthorized mining. With the domestic crystal supply tightening, local entrepreneurs increasingly traveled around the world to find new sources of raw material. As one director of a crystal industry group told a newspaper: “Where there are raw stones, there are people from Donghai.”
Venturing to faraway places was not seen as daring, but simply as the standard mode of doing business, says Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in Chinese industrial policy. In China, there is “this idea, almost like overconfidence, that you can just go anywhere in the world and outwork and outmaneuver whoever,” Chan says. People tend to “not see the cultural barriers as, like, real barriers.”
Wu Qingfeng says that Donghai traders were surprised to find the wealth abroad. They learned about enormous finds in Africa, he says, after people in a neighboring province traveled there to take part in a humanitarian project. Some countries had so much quartz that they paved roads with it. In Donghai, the crystal deposits are scattered, says Wu, “but if you go to Madagascar, Zambia, Congo and other countries, you will find that the local rose quartz is like coal – a whole mountain is rose quartz.”
Liu, the owner of Big Purple Crystal, says he started traveling abroad to search for amethyst about a decade ago. His first stop was Brazil. “I got a cheap plane and brought a translator with me,” he says. “The other day I bought my first shipping container – about 20 tons of stuff.” But Liu struggled to make money, so he looked for opportunities elsewhere. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, an extensive annual gathering, he came across impressive pieces of amethyst from Uruguay, and he decided to go there.
