How China’s ‘Crystal Capital’ Cornered the Market on a Western Obsession

At the Big Purple Crystal warehouse in eastern China’s Donghai County, hundreds of imported amethyst geodes are lined up in rows, their spiky insides open as if mid-scream. Some are shaped like eggs and perched on carved wooden stands. One crystal rides on the back of a bixi, a mythical creature with the body of a turtle and the head of a dragon. On shelves and in boxes lining the floor are countless smaller geodes roughly the size of fists, the kind you might find in a new age gift shop. The owner, Liu Junwen, sits in flip-flops behind his desk, which is, of course, an enormous amethyst geode topped with glass.

Mineral abundance isn’t unusual in Donghai. Liu may not even be the biggest operator on this block. Over the past few decades, the county has transformed from an unremarkable backwater into the “crystal capital” of China and, arguably, the world. In 2023, its crystal trade was estimated to be worth more than $5.5 billion. Liu is among some 300,000 people—about a quarter of local residents—who work directly in the business as dealers, wholesalers, livestreamers, gemologists, crystal cutters, factory managers, bead stringers, exporters, and freight agents. Together, they orchestrate a global market: The tower of Brazilian amethyst in a London yoga studio, the Colombian quartz on the reception desk of a Miami Botox clinic, the Zambian citrine in an overpriced tourist shop in Tulum—chances are, a lot of them passed through Donghai.

Liu is the first to admit that none of this is normal. “I grew up in a village where almost every household was impoverished,” he says. “It feels unbelievable that crystals could make you rich.” But stories like his are common in Donghai. Nearly everyone we spoke with, from cab drivers and young entrepreneurs to livestreamers and longtime traders, described it as a place defined by surges of opportunity followed by sudden crashes, where information travels fast and margins can evaporate overnight. People are constantly rushing to buy and sell the shiniest new thing, often only to realize the market has already shifted and someone else caught the wave first.

Western lawmakers and analysts have long argued that China became the world’s factory by exploiting cheap labor and distorting global markets. Donghai offers an alternative account: It shows how China’s industrial rise emerged in large part from rural villages, at a moment when hundreds of millions of people were desperate to escape poverty and saw global capitalism as a way out. The county became a glittering crystal mecca not necessarily because of top-down industrial policy, but because of a nearly all-consuming drive to hustle.

Tectonic Shift

“Nature has been very kind to Donghai,” explains a plaque at the Donghai Crystal Museum, a more than 300,000-square-foot building shaped like a giant jagged crystal. The county sits on the Tan-Lu fault, which stretches along China’s eastern coast. Over millions of years, tectonic activity created fractures that filled with silica-rich fluids, which slowly crystallized into deposits of clear quartz.

For generations, farmers in Donghai found crystals in their fields and turned them into jewelry and ornaments. After the Communists took over in 1949, crystal mining was folded into the planned economy, and commercial extraction was banned. The central government recognized quartz as a strategic natural resource, useful for things like making optical lenses, and over time a sizable civilian workforce sprouted up in Donghai. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, the father of the Chinese Communist Party was laid to rest in a transparent coffin made with the finest Donghai quartz.

Rural China was still deeply poor; decades of collectivized farming had kept incomes low. After Deng Xiaoping took power and loosened some of the government’s rigid economic controls, people suddenly had the freedom to build small, scrappy businesses known as township and village enterprises. Their success blindsided even top party leaders. “Every year, township and village industries achieved 20 percent growth,” Deng later reflected to a group of journalists. “This was not something I had thought about. Nor had the other comrades. This surprised us.”

Villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. The town of Xuchang, for instance, capitalized on its legacy of making hairpieces for opera performers—and on the willingness of rural women to sell their black ponytails—and turned itself into a hub for wigs. Zhuangzhai became the largest supplier of caskets to Japan, in part through its proximity to groves of paulownia, a lightweight, slow-burning wood favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. The town 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 plenty of quartz and skilled labor, as well as entrepreneurs who were willing to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Crystal Museum who now leads boot camps for wannabe crystal entrepreneurs, says that in the late 1980s, artisans learned to modify washing machine motors so they could polish crystal necklaces, previously a manual job. When there wasn’t enough raw crystal to keep up with demand, manufacturers resorted to glass from beer bottles to make beads. People in Donghai told us they recall the shortage becoming so dire at one point that restaurants and bars ran out of beer.

Around the same time, illegal mining was spiraling out of control. All the digging was causing roads to collapse and houses to sink, sometimes leading to injuries and deaths, according to Chinese media. In late 2001, Donghai County authorities warned of an impending crackdown on unauthorized mining. With the domestic crystal supply tightening up, local entrepreneurs were increasingly traveling all over the world to find new sources of raw material. As one executive from a crystal industry group told a newspaper, “Wherever there are raw stones, there are people from Donghai.”

Venturing to far-flung locales was seen not as daring but simply as the default mode of doing business, says Kyle Chan, a fellow at the Brookings Institution who specializes in Chinese industrial policy. In China, there’s “this idea, almost like overconfidence, that you can just go wherever in the world and outwork and outmaneuver whoever,” Chan says. People tend not to “see the cultural barriers as, like, real barriers.”

Wu Qingfeng says that Donghai traders were astonished by the riches to be found abroad. They learned about enormous deposits in Africa, he says, after people in a neighboring province traveled there to participate in a humanitarian project. Some countries had so much quartz that they were paving roads with it. In Donghai, the crystal deposits are scattered, Wu says, “but when you go to Madagascar, Zambia, the Congo, and other countries, you find that the local rose quartz is like coal—an entire mountain is rose quartz.”

Liu, the owner of Big Purple Crystal, says he began traveling abroad to look for amethyst about a decade ago. His first stop was Brazil. “I got a cheap plane ticket and brought along a translator,” he says. “The next day, I bought my first shipping container—about 20 tons of goods.” But Liu struggled to make money, so he searched for opportunities elsewhere. At the Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, a sprawling annual gathering, he came across impressive amethyst pieces from Uruguay, and he decided to go there.

The Livestreamer-in-Chief

It’s 7 am, and the raw crystal flea market in Donghai’s Xingxi village is bustling. Merchants sit in camping chairs and bicker beside tarps piled with stones. Artisans pick up unassuming rocks and shine powerful flashlights through them. A livestreamer holds a big bag of pink crystal bracelets with one hand and shouts into a tiny phone he clutches with the other. “200 units at just 9.9!” he barks. An elderly villager watching nearby does some quick math under his breath—almost $300 for just five minutes of broadcasting. There’s a hint of awe in his voice; maybe a touch of envy too.

The livestreamer, Zhao Zhonggang, is the Communist Party secretary of Xingxi, a village of some 4,000 people where he says roughly 70 percent of residents work in the crystal trade. Online, where he’s known as the Crystal Secretary, Zhao posts videos of his daily life—touring the flea market to help vendors sell, chatting with elders, and playing basketball with local kids. One of the biggest concerns for crystal buyers is the risk of fakes, and few things are more reassuring than an official title. Zhao’s credibility carries so much weight that fans have driven across the country just to meet him in person, according to local media reports.

Zhao is a particularly Chinese kind of politician, the product of a system that evaluates officials based on how their districts perform economically. In this world, the boundary between governing and doing business blurs. Zhao’s office isn’t in some stately municipal building—it’s down the hall from a workshop where women string crystal bracelets by hand. Right outside the door is a stockpile of crystal skulls, zodiac animals, and even penises. (Overseas customers prefer products like this that are “a bit strange-looking,” one of Zhao’s employees explains. “There’s simply no market for them in China.”)

Zhao’s journey began in 2012, when he became an assistant for a nearby village committee. He noticed that piles of crystal fragments from local workshops were being wasted. Later, under his leadership, villagers began repurposing them for higher-end products. They arranged the bits into mosaic lampshades and sewed them into “healing” pillows and mattresses, contributing to millions of dollars in domestic and international sales.

Zhao was transferred to Xingxi in 2019. As pandemic lockdowns pushed commerce online, he launched an account on Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, and racked up followers, helping Xingxi earn the nickname “24/7 Livestream Village.” At first, people were broadcasting mostly to domestic shoppers. But the following year, the clattering sound of Donghai crystals began radiating from smartphones across the US and UK.

Under the glow of ring lights, TikTok livestreamers plunged metal scoops into massive buckets, pouring amethyst bracelets, chunks of lapis, and towers of clear quartz into baskets and plastic bags. Above the sparkling piles, signs beckoned viewers to spend between $2.99 and $9.99 for their own “lucky scoop.” By the end of 2022, crystals had become one of the best-selling products on TikTok Shop globally.

“There was explosive growth,” Liu recalls. “The entire crystal industry was shipping to the US.” Local residents opened livestreaming “supermarkets,” where hundreds of streamers could broadcast at once. The government simplified licensing and compliance requirements and partnered with a state bank to launch a foreign-currency settlement program, lowering the cost of selling directly to buyers abroad.

Together, these initiatives helped Donghai collapse the old crystal supply chain. Instead of passing through layers of wholesalers and retail stores, goods could now flow straight from the crystal capital to foreign consumers, cutting out the middlemen and lowering prices. “Donghai people were extremely good at the internet,” says Liu. At the market’s peak, he says, Big Purple Crystal could sell an entire shipping container of amethyst in one or two hours.

Wu Qingfeng, the boot camp instructor, says this golden period lasted a year or two. Some companies recruited live-streamers who had no professional experience and could speak only a little English. They would go on camera and say all kinds of nonsense, Wu recalls, and still potentially make thousands of dollars a day. But then customers started to catch on that different sellers were broadcasting from the same building, Wu says: “Everyone understood: It turned out you were all one Chinese supermarket.”

Customers started searching for the best deals, and a brutal price war broke out in Donghai. “This cross-border supermarket business became mutually malicious competition,” says Wu. TikTok also started cracking down on scammier, low-quality crystal content, and even the lucky scoop format was eventually banned. By the summer of 2023, he says, many small- and midsize crystal businesses started to get wiped out.

The downturn has dragged on. But in Donghai, another surge always feels just around the corner. Inside one market, a sign advertised “crystal express loans” for local merchants, with flexible repayment terms designed to keep cash flowing. At a seminar for cross-border sellers, a representative from China Mobile, the state-owned telecom, advertised a service that lets companies bypass China’s so-called Great Firewall to set up shops on international platforms like TikTok and Temu. It was pitched as a government-approved substitute for VPNs, which are tightly restricted in China.

In the US, the core tactics Donghai has used—subsidizing local businesses, building communal infrastructure, and aggressively pursuing global market share—are viewed with deep suspicion. Rather than savvy development tools, US lawmakers and pundits have framed them as unfair practices that undermine “market-oriented competition” and put American companies at a disadvantage. This rhetoric has fueled a popular narrative about China’s economic growth that is incomplete, reduced to little more than nefarious state interference.

Pressing On

Just across the street from Liu’s warehouse sits International Crystal Jewelry City Plaza, a megamall packed with some 7,000 businesses hawking everything from stretchy bracelet cord to loose emeralds. A flea market is happening out front today, and Wu is preparing 20 or so of his boot camp students for the impending chaos.

“When buying at the market, don’t ask the vendor if it’s real or fake—don’t,” Wu says. “They’ll think you can’t even tell, so why wouldn’t they scam you?”

Another tip: Don’t be too eager to stockpile inventory, because prices fluctuate. White quartz, he explains, now sells for just 10 to 20 percent of its most recent high. “What are you supposed to do with that inventory if you bought it at the higher price?” Wu asks. “How much ‘mystical energy’ would you have to add to it before you could even sell it?” He tells the students he recently heard about the owner of a crystal factory who bought a huge order of white quartz before prices dropped and ended up jumping off a building.

A few blocks away, a different kind of glittering industry is on the rise in Donghai: elaborate, gem-encrusted press-on nails. News reports tout press-ons as the region’s next signature export, part of a so-called “fingertip economy” built around small, handmade goods designed for livestreaming and fast international shipping. One wholesaler estimates that Donghai already produces roughly 70 percent of China’s press-on nails, at a scale of around 400,000 sets a day.

At one nail shop, the walls are lined with metal racks of clear plastic packages, each containing a set of 10 nails. There are hundreds of options, and they all cost less than $2. A hedonistic urge takes over, and we begin grabbing things—shimmery pale pink nails painted with swirling koi fish, a long green set with 3D lotus flowers glued on each thumb. In the corner of the store is a workstation splattered with nail polish and glue, hinting at the painstaking human labor behind the finished products.

The shop’s owner, a woman in her forties with a young daughter, tells us she brings in $200,000 to $300,000 annually, income she credits largely to livestreaming. Business is especially strong in niche markets like Japan and South Korea, where she says competition is thinner and margins are higher. As the shop owner chats with us and sorts through paperwork, a young female livestreamer stands in front of a rack, speaking into her phone in Japanese. She holds up a set of nails, tilting them back and forth, as a ribbon of light flashes across their surface. The color is like deep blue quartz—saturated and luminous.

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