Villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. The city of Zhuangzhai became the largest supplier of caskets to Japan, partly due to its proximity to groves of paulownia, a lightweight, slow-burning wood favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. The city of Qiaotou became the world's button-making capital after three brothers found a handful of discarded buttons in a gutter and decided to resell them, or so the story goes.
Donghai already had sufficient quartz and skilled labor, but also entrepreneurs willing to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Crystal Museum and now leader of boot camps for budding crystal entrepreneurs, says that in the late 1980s, artisans learned to modify washing machine motors so they could polish crystal necklaces, which had previously been a manual job. When there was not enough raw crystal to meet demand, manufacturers resorted to glass from beer bottles to make beads. People in Donghai told us they remember the shortage at one point becoming so dire that restaurants and bars ran out of beer.
Around the same time, illegal mining spiraled out of control. All the digging caused roads to collapse and houses to sink, sometimes resulting in injuries and deaths, according to Chinese media. In late 2001, Donghai County authorities warned of an impending crackdown on illegal mining. As the domestic crystal supply became increasingly tight, local entrepreneurs increasingly traveled around the world to find new sources of raw materials. As an executive of a crystal industry group told a newspaper, “Wherever there are rough stones, there are people from Donghai.”
Entering far-flung places wasn't seen as daring, just the standard way of doing business, said Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in Chinese industrial policy. In China, “there's this idea, almost like hubris, that you can just go anywhere in the world and outsmart anyone,” Chan says. People tend to 'not see the cultural barriers as real barriers'.
Wu Qingfeng says Donghai traders were amazed at the riches to be found abroad. They learned about vast supplies 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, Wu says, “but if you go to Madagascar, Zambia, Congo and other countries, you 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 look for amethyst about a decade ago. His first stop was Brazil. “I bought a cheap plane ticket and took an interpreter with me,” he says. “The next day I bought my first shipping container – about 20 tons of goods.” But Liu struggled to make money, so he looked elsewhere for opportunities. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, a sprawling annual gathering, he came across impressive amethyst pieces from Uruguay, and decided to go there.
