Images here are of a showroom of yellow rosewood furniture replicated from a Ming Dynasty intellectual residence and a yellow rosewood tree, via sina.com. Translated by CDT from Xinmin Weekly (新民周刊) magazine:
If you want to find the richest Chinese village, you may look elsewhere than the well-known Huaxi (华西村). Now you may want to take a look at this Hainan village where almost everybody grows trees in their backyard. Because the tree, or more precisely the wood, is the new gold there and across the mainland.
Zhanfu village (Âç†Á¨¶Êùë) used to be very poor and has very limited arable land (1,700 mu for 3,700 people). Locals sum up the poverty in three phrases: borrow the moonlight to have village committee meetings, loan the prayer temples for school children, and count a family’s number of water tanks before accepting a marriage offer for daughters. As the area is very dry, village used to gather rain water in water tanks for drinking and other uses. And the number of water tanks is a popular measurement of a family’s wealth in the village.
Now the measurement of wealth in this village and neighboring ones is not the water tanks, but yellow rosewood trees, the prices of which have skyrocketed over recent years with a booming market craving antique furniture in many parts of China.
In 1985, yellow rosewood sold for one yuan per half-kilogram. More than 20 years later, it goes as high as 9,000 yuan per half-kilo. Zhanfu, the small village of 700 households, holds two thirds of Hainan island’s rosewood stock, making the village worth over one billion yuan.
Now a lot of families grow rosewood trees, or transplant trees from hills nearby, in their backyards, hoping to make more profits in a still skyrocketing market. At the house of Wang Shenggao (王胜高), a betel nut processor-turned rosewood grower, his backyard of 100 trees could easily make him a millionaire. He bought these trees for 70,000 yuan in recent years. He bought one 20-centimeter diameter tree for 7,000 yuan and now someone approached him to sell it for 300,00 yuan. Like many others, Wang is holding off on selling. He is pretty sure that in ten years he will easily be ten times as rich as he is now.
The village’s gold rush came out of a sense of helplessness in climbing out of poverty. In the early 1980s, some Zhanfu villagers left home to western mountains in Hainan for work, mostly driving motor tricycle cabs or peddling sugar cane on the streets. But these early migrant workers from Zhanfu spotted the local resource of rosewood. Bit by bit, they hauled rosewood back to their home village to stock up. By 1992, the village’s stockpile of the wood was significant and it became a famous rosewood trading hub.
Wang Yingquan (ÁéãËã±ÊùÉ) is Zhanfu’s deputy village party secretary. He was also one of the first to hit the jackpot dealing in rosewood. He learned about the medicinal nature of rosewood while helping a drug company in Hainan collect medicine in late 1980s. He bought 140 tons of rosewood stumps and roots from another county at 30 cents per half-kilo, and sold it to the drug company for 1.6 yuan/half-kilo. Right there he became a “ten-grandaire (‰∏áÂÖÉÊà∑),” a millionaire by standards of that time. But if he kept the wood until now, he figures, he would have hundreds of millions of dollars already.
And he has seen a lot of people, including Wang, getting a lot wealthier year by year, as the prices for rosewood shot up from dirt cheap to over 1,000 yuan per half-kilo in 2005.
The catch to this situation is that rosewood is a second grade endangered species and Hainan Province has been cracking down on rosewood dealing. Some of the rich Zhanfu men got jailed or detained while buying trees from elsewhere. But the discretion of the villagers has been the key to the success of the business. Nobody has reported on one another, a current village official said.
On the other hand, a Hainan forestry official gave compliments to Zhanfu, where people have a lot of incentive to grow the trees, which helps the endangered situation of the rosewood. [Full Text in Chinese]
