How did the Chinese “Crystal Capital” corner the market due to a Western obsession?

The villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. For example, Xuchang capitalized on its heritage of making hair extensions for opera performers — and on rural women’s willingness to sell black ponytails — into a city. Wig hub. Zhuangzhai has become the largest supplier of caskets to Japan, partly because of its proximity to orchards of paulownia, a lightweight, slow-burning wood favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. Kiaoto became the button-making capital of the world after three brothers found a bunch of discarded buttons in a gutter and decided to resell them, or so the story goes.

Donghai already had plenty of quartz and skilled labor, as well as businessmen who were willing to experiment. In the late 1980s, craftsmen learned to modify washing machine motors so they could polish crystal necklaces, previously a manual job, says Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Crystal Museum who now leads training camps for aspiring crystal entrepreneurs. When there wasn’t enough raw crystal to keep up with demand, manufacturers turned to glass from beer bottles to make beads. People in Donghae told us they remember the shortage becoming so dire at one point that restaurants and bars ran out of beer.

Around the same time, illegal mining was spiraling out of control. All the excavation work caused roads to collapse and homes to sink, sometimes leading to injuries and deaths, according to Chinese media. In late 2001, authorities in Donghai Province warned of an impending crackdown on unauthorized mining. As domestic crystal supplies shrink, local entrepreneurs are increasingly traveling around the world to find new sources of raw materials. As one executive from a crystal industry group told a newspaper: “Wherever there are rough stones, there are people from Donghai.”

Venturing into remote regions was not seen as bold, but simply as the default mode of doing business, says Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in Chinese industrial policy. In China, there is “an idea that is almost like overconfidence, that you can go anywhere in the world and outmaneuver anyone,” says Chan. People tend not to “see cultural barriers as real barriers,” says Chan.

Wu Qingfeng says that Donghai merchants were amazed at the riches to be found abroad. He says they learned of huge deposits in Africa, after people in a neighboring province traveled there to participate in a humanitarian project. Some countries had so much quartz that they paved roads with it. In Donghai, crystalline deposits are scattered, says Wu, “but when you go to Madagascar, Zambia, Congo and other countries, the local pink quartz is like coal, as the whole mountain is pink quartz.”

Liu, the owner of Big Purple Crystal, says he started traveling abroad to hunt for amethyst about a decade ago. His first stop was Brazil. “I got a cheap plane ticket and brought a translator with me,” he says. “The next day, I bought my first shipping container – about 20 tons of cargo.” But Liu was struggling to make money, so he looked for opportunities elsewhere. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, a sprawling annual gathering, he found gorgeous amethysts from Uruguay, and decided to go there.