Villages were looking for niches that they could fill on the world market. For example, the city of Xuchang took advantage of its heritage in the production of hairpieces for opera performers and the willingness of rural women to sell their black ponytails and developed into wig center. Zhuangzhai became Japan’s largest supplier of coffins, thanks in part to its proximity to paulownia groves, a airy, 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 discarded buttons in the gutter and decided to resell them, or so the story goes.
Donghai already had plenty of quartz and skilled labor, as well as entrepreneurs willing to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Crystal Museum who now runs training camps for would-be crystal entrepreneurs, says that in the delayed 1980s, artisans learned to modify washing machine motors to be able to polish crystal necklaces, which had previously been a manual job. When there was not enough raw crystal to keep up with demand, manufacturers resorted to glass from beer bottles to make beads. Residents of Donghai told us they remember that at one point the shortage was so severe that restaurants and bars ran out of beer.
Around the same time, illegal mining got out of control. According to Chinese media, all the earthworks caused roads to collapse and houses to collapse, sometimes leading to injuries and deaths. In delayed 2001, Donghai County authorities warned of an impending crackdown on illegal mining. As domestic crystal supplies dwindled, local entrepreneurs increasingly traveled around the world in search of fresh sources of the raw material. As one executive of a crystal industry group told the newspaper: “Wherever there are raw stones, there are people from Donghai.”
Going to distant places was not seen as bold but simply the default way of doing business, says Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in Chinese industrial policy. In China, there’s “this idea, almost like overconfidence, that you can just go anywhere in the world and outwork and outsmart anyone,” Chan says. People don’t usually “see cultural barriers as real barriers.”
Wu Qingfeng says that Donghai merchants were amazed at the riches that could be found abroad. He says they learned about the huge deposits in Africa when residents of a neighboring province went there to take part in a humanitarian project. In some countries there was so much quartz that roads were paved with it. Wu says that in Donghai, the crystal deposits are scattered, “but when you go to Madagascar, Zambia, Congo and other countries, you will find that the local rose quartz is like coal – the whole mountain is rose quartz.”
Liu, the owner of Gigantic Purple Crystal, says he started traveling abroad in search of amethyst about a decade ago. His first stop was Brazil. “I bought a cheap plane ticket and took a translator with me,” he says. “The next day I bought my first shipping container – about 20 tons of goods.” But Liu had difficulty making money, so he looked for opportunities elsewhere. While attending the annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, he came across some impressive amethyst specimens from Uruguay and decided to go there.