Villages regarded for niches they may fill within the international market. The city of Xuchang, as an example, capitalized on its legacy of constructing hairpieces for opera performers—and on the willingness of rural ladies to promote their black ponytails—and turned itself right into a hub for wigs. Zhuangzhai turned the biggest provider of caskets to Japan, partially by means of its proximity to groves of paulownia, a light-weight, slow-burning wooden favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. The city of Qiaotou turned the world’s button-making capital after three brothers discovered a handful of discarded buttons in a gutter and determined to resell them, or so the story goes.
Donghai already had loads of quartz and expert labor, in addition to entrepreneurs who had been keen to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor on the Crystal Museum who now leads boot camps for wannabe crystal entrepreneurs, says that within the late Eighties, artisans realized to change washer motors so they may polish crystal necklaces, beforehand a guide job. When there wasn’t sufficient uncooked crystal to maintain up with demand, producers resorted to glass from beer bottles to make beads. People in Donghai advised us they recall the scarcity turning into so dire at one level that eating places and bars ran out of beer.
Around the identical time, unlawful mining was spiraling uncontrolled. All the digging was inflicting roads to break down and homes to sink, typically resulting in accidents and deaths, in accordance with Chinese media. In late 2001, Donghai County authorities warned of an impending crackdown on unauthorized mining. With the home crystal provide tightening up, native entrepreneurs had been more and more touring all around the world to seek out new sources of uncooked materials. As one government from a crystal business group advised a newspaper, “Wherever there are raw stones, there are people from Donghai.”
Venturing to far-flung locales was seen not as daring however merely because the default mode of doing enterprise, says Kyle Chan, a fellow on the Brookings Institution who makes a speciality of Chinese industrial coverage. In China, there’s “this idea, almost like overconfidence, that you can just go wherever in the world and outwork and outmaneuver whoever,” Chan says. People have a tendency to not “see the cultural barriers as, like, real barriers.”
Wu Qingfeng says that Donghai merchants had been astonished by the riches to be discovered overseas. They realized about huge deposits in Africa, he says, after folks in a neighboring province traveled there to take part in a humanitarian venture. Some international locations had a lot quartz that they had been paving roads with it. In Donghai, the crystal deposits are scattered, Wu says, “but when you go to Madagascar, Zambia, the Congo, and other countries, you find that the local rose quartz is like coal—an entire mountain is rose quartz.”
Liu, the proprietor of Big Purple Crystal, says he started touring overseas to search for amethyst a couple of decade in the past. His first cease was Brazil. “I got a cheap plane ticket and brought along a translator,” he says. “The next day, I bought my first shipping container—about 20 tons of goods.” But Liu struggled to earn money, so he looked for alternatives elsewhere. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, a sprawling annual gathering, he got here throughout spectacular amethyst items from Uruguay, and he determined to go there.
https://www.wired.com/story/china-crystal-capital/