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April 17, 2015

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Villagers risk everything to feed tree craze

By Qu Zhi | April 17, 2015, Friday | Print Edition

REN Yanfu died last year at only 34. He fell from a cliff while looking for yabai roots. An extremely rare species of cypress, yabai (literally “clilff cypress”) typically grows on mountain slopes at elevations of 1,500 meters or more above sea level.

This seldom-seen plant — which is part of a larger group of coveted plants known as arborvitaes (ironically Latin for “trees of life”) — is now much sought after by collectors and traditional Chinese medicine practitioners, many of whom are willing to pay thousands of yuan for top-quality specimens.

Ren, a native of Jiaogou Village in north China’s Shanxi Province, was among many who still risk life and limb to feed the booming demand for yabai and other arborvitaes.

With fortunes hanging in the balance, many in Shanxi have been lured onto sheer cliff faces in search of plants that could make them wealthy. All too often though, such quests have ended in tragedy.

According to Southern Metropolis Daily, more than 20 people have plummeted to their deaths while scouring for yabai.

When his fellow villagers found Ren’s body, his feet were lodged in the soil from the force of his impact with the ground. Over the next four months, two other villages died in identical circumstances.

“We have to make desperate efforts to earn money because we are so poor,” one villager explained to Southern Metropolis Daily.

Most villagers head to the cliffs without training or specialized equipment.

Ren’s village has only 400 residents. Beside farming, there are few local opportunities to earn a living.

Most farmers in the village earn only a few hundred yuan per month from their meager plots, and many rely on remittances from relatives working outside the village to make ends meet.

“We can get this much money (20,000 yuan/US$3,226) just by selling a piece of good-quality yabai,” the leader of Jiaogou Village, He Jianjun, told Southern Metropolis Daily. He estimated that the village has sold cypresses worth 1 million yuan.

Despite the dangers facing those on the front lines of the yabai trade, the economic benefits created by the thriving market are hard to ignore.

“Our institution has loaned over 500,000 yuan to about 50 villagers for processing and selling yabai,” Chen Zhitian, director of the Zecheng Credit Union in Zuoquan County, Shanxi, told local media.

“Since the business goes well, most of the villagers has repaid the principal with interest,” he added.

The cost of cutting and preparing arborvitaes for sales is relatively low. According to Southern Metropolis Daily, a piece of yabai timber that costs 700 yuan to process can then be sold to a dealer for 3,000 yuan. This same piece, once it hits the retail market, could sell for 6,000 yuan.

According to Chen, one particularly successful family in Zecheng Village earned over 1 million yuan from this trade in a single year, while three families earned more than 800,000 yuan.

Yet some are skeptical of the market’s long-term viability.

“I doubt the value of arborvitaes. The market for this timber is twisted,” Jason Liu, a veteran collector and antiques dealer, tells Shanghai Daily. Liu has just returned from a Christie’s auction in New York.

“The craze for arborvitaes started out of nowhere one or two years ago. It has no cultural background in the past and as for the timber itself, there is no way it can be appreciated as red sandalwood or eaglewood,” he explains.

As Liu notes, China’s collecting market often hypes certain objects without first taking into account their historical significance or inherent qualities.

“The only thing that makes arborvitaes special is their rarity. But as an important natural resource, people should protect them ... I feel sad that so many people have died for this,” Liu says.

Under China’s Forestry Law, it is illegal to cut wild yabai since it is listed as an endangered species.

Forestry officials are now struggling to crack down on the trade, yet the crackdown has only raised the plants value, said the dealers.

According to Southern Metropolis Daily, harvesting continues at a frantic pace in places like Quma Village in Shanxi.

“During the peak season, every day at dusk, the villagers will bring back a carload of yabai timbers,” a villager said.

But with the government stepping in, villagers ply their trade in secret by hiding the plants until the dealers arrive.

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