How a Chinese town sells crickets for millions (5 photos)

In a Chinese village near a river, people are collecting beautiful stones like crazy to sell. And in this village in the small town of Sidian, everyone is crazy about catching the crickets living in the area. Because they can be sold for 50,000 yuan ($6,000).





Big, FAT ones. But yesterday they were small, but three)

Crickets of the highest standard

This is because there is a population of excellent large crickets around the city. Come on, big ones, most importantly – aggressive ones. After all, they gather in order to sell them to the fighting arena!

In Mexico they love cockfights, in some places they love dog fights, but in the Chinese tradition they love pig and cricket fights.

At the same time, the tradition of cricket wrestling is incredibly ancient, it is mentioned in artifacts from the Tang Dynasty (618-904). And already at that time, emperors sent hunters specifically to the village of Sidian, because their courtiers kept chronicles of victories.



They catch it with a small net on a leg. I just want to scream like Ostap Bender: Why did you steal the strainer!?

And according to these scrolls, most often crickets from Sidian brought victory to the owner. How could the inhabitants of this already modern city not use the fact that they were locally included in the Great Cricket Scrolls!?

Therefore, the entire village, to one degree or another, feeds itself by catching crickets in the summer and selling them to gamblers, or to cunning cricket retailers.

80% of the town’s population fishes on a daily basis; some residents know the secrets of training fighting crickets in order to show them off in action when the time comes to “show off the goods.”





From connoisseur to connoisseur, street cricket market

How much is a cricket for the people?

The most expensive cricket is said to have sold for 50,000 yuan ($6,000). But this one is special, big and bad, with an average price per fighter of about 15,000 yuan ($2,000).

In 2014, newspapers reported that the most expensive cricket ever sold in Xidian Village was worth 300,000 yuan (almost $40,000).



Crickets are stored in jars like these with ventilation.

You can buy a very cheap old cricket for as little as a dollar. Or two and make them fight. Just to feel like part of the cricket fighting industry, where big money is spinning and family fortunes are being squandered!

The most luxurious thing is that there is a whole industry dedicated to the sale of crickets. Not far from the sales site, hotels have been opened where visiting buyers from all over China rent rooms. Often such hotels are run by parents of sons who are active in cricket fishing.



You also need to be able to set crickets against each other. Delicate work though!

By the way, cricket fighting was banned during the Cultural Revolution as bourgeois entertainment, but what does 20-30 years mean against the backdrop of a thousand years of history? They were very quickly revived as an ancient tradition. And from Shanghai they even launched a special seasonal bus for those who want to get to the cricket market.

True, they began to catch insects so intensively that they almost halved the population. Apparently, after several generations, local crickets evolve from large and aggressive to fast and elusive.