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Local villagers and cricket enthusiasts from around China meet in Sidian every summer. Photo: Qq.com

In summer, the villagers make a killing in China’s fighting cricket capital

Residents of a Chinese town famous for breeding fighting crickets made up to 15,000 yuan (HK$18,000) a month during summer when business boomed – as it does every year – around the venerable sport, local media report. 

Each year, from mid-July to late August, the insects sing and enthusiasts from around the nation converge on Sidian, in Shandong province, the undisputed capital of crickets, according to the popular news portal Qq.com.

Everyone in the town catches crickets in the fields to make money. Trade is so good that those who work most of the year out of town return home for the cricket harvest, and children on their summer vacation are happy to pitch in as well.

“It’s become a festival for family reunion,” a local resident said. “Even more people return now than at the Lunar New Year [the traditional family festival in China].”

A villager at a local workshop making pots for keeping the insects shows one of the devices, half-filled with local soil, that sells for 70 cents. Each workshop sells several thousand pots a day during cricket season.

Those who specialise in catching crickets earn more – about 15,000 yuan a month for a veteran, the villager said.

The tradition of cricket fighting dates back to the Tang dynasty (618-904), and unlike other forms of animal combat involving bulls, roosters or dogs, the insects are rarely harmed.

The crickets – all males – are arranged by weight class. The bouts take place in a bamboo cage with two insects separated by a divider. Their owner stimulate their whiskers, which makes them aggressive. When both are properly agitated, the separator is raised and the battle starts. The first one to run away loses.

Like most forms of fun, the sport was banned during the Cultural Revolution as a bourgeois indulgence.

While it is illegal to bet on matches on the mainland, the sport is seeing a revival as a genuine Chinese tradition.

The trade at specialist cricket markets in Shanghai alone is to be worth hundreds of millions of yuan a year.

 

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