I went to the flower and bird market on Saturday for a stroll among the greenery and came upon a small shop dedicated to selling crickets and cricket-keeping paraphernalia.
The little cages for the crickets are incredible - miniature bird cages, carved gourds, woven cages. There are different ones for the different tasks involved in keeping crickets. And some of the crickets are not small - they are pretty big and ferocious looking.
Cricket keeping has a long and respectable history in China (they even had a ‘Cricket Minister’ in the government at one stage (or maybe he was called the Cricket Minister because he was an official who got hooked on cricket fighting. I’m not clear on the fine points.)
Anyway they are BIG. You can have fighting crickets or singing crickets. I think fighting your crickets is not allowed anymore, except on special days. Gambling on your fighting cricket got lots of people in trouble (they lost all their money) so it was made illegal. And I was told a story about a rich man who was obsessed with them and when he found a cricket he liked, he’d swap a horse for it. He had this favourite cricket that his wife let out of its cage by mistake one day. A chook ate it and the wife killed herself rather than face her husband when he came home. He got home to find a dead wife and missing (presumed dead) cricket and killed himself too. I’m not sure whether it was over the wife or the cricket.
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