How a Tiny Chinese County Became the World’s Unlikely Crystal Capital
Inside the Big Purple Crystal warehouse in Donghai County, eastern China, hundreds of imported amethyst geodes stand stacked in neat rows. Their jagged, crystalline interiors are split open wide, as if frozen mid-cry. Some are egg-shaped, propped up on hand-carved wooden bases. One large geode even rests atop the back of a bixi—a legendary Chinese creature with a turtle’s body and a dragon’s head. Countless smaller geodes, roughly fist-sized and the same type sold at New Age gift shops around the world, fill shelves and stack in boxes across the warehouse floor. The warehouse owner, Liu Junwen, sits behind his desk in flip-flops; naturally, the desk itself is a massive amethyst geode capped with a sheet of glass.
Abundant mineral deposits are nothing out of the ordinary for Donghai, and Liu is far from the largest crystal dealer on his block. Over the past few decades, this once unassuming rural backwater has reshaped itself into China’s undisputed “crystal capital,” and arguably the global center of the trade. In 2023, the total value of Donghai’s crystal industry was estimated at more than $5.5 billion. Roughly a quarter of the county’s population—some 300,000 people—work directly in the sector, holding roles ranging from dealers and wholesalers to livestreamers, gemologists, crystal cutters, factory managers, bead stringers, exporters and freight agents. Together, they run a sprawling global network: the tall Brazilian amethyst display in a London yoga studio, the Colombian quartz on the front desk of a Miami Botox clinic, the Zambian citrine at an overpriced Tulum tourist shop—odds are, most of these pieces passed through Donghai at some point.
Liu is the first to acknowledge that this transformation is anything but normal. “I grew up in a village where nearly every family lived in poverty,” he says. “It still feels unbelievable that crystals could lift people out of poverty and build wealth.” But stories like his are commonplace in Donghai. Nearly everyone we spoke to—from taxi drivers and young founders to veteran traders and full-time livestreamers—described the county as a place defined by booms that can vanish as quickly as they arrive. Information spreads at lightning speed, but profit margins can disappear overnight. People are always rushing to buy and sell the next trendy new crystal, only to often find the market has already shifted, and someone else caught the wave first.
Western lawmakers and analysts have long argued that China’s rise as the world’s factory stems from exploiting cheap labor and manipulating global markets. But Donghai tells a different story: it reveals how much of China’s industrial growth grew out of rural communities, at a time when hundreds of millions of people were desperate to escape poverty and saw global capitalism as their path out. The county became a global crystal mecca not primarily because of top-down industrial policy, but because of an almost relentless, all-encompassing culture of hustle.
Tectonic Shift
A plaque at the 300,000-square-foot Donghai Crystal Museum—whose building is shaped like a giant, jagged crystal—reads: “Nature has been very kind to Donghai.” The county sits along the Tan-Lu Fault, which runs the length of China’s eastern coast. Over millions of years, tectonic activity created deep cracks that filled with silica-rich fluids, which slowly crystallized into large deposits of clear quartz.
For generations, Donghai’s farmers found small crystals in their fields and carved them into jewelry and decorations. After 1949, crystal mining was brought under the planned economy, and private commercial mining was banned. The central government classified quartz as a strategic natural resource, critical for manufacturing products like optical lenses, and over time a large skilled civilian workforce grew up around the industry in Donghai. When Mao Zedong died in 1976, he was buried in a transparent casket carved from the highest-quality Donghai quartz.
Rural China remained deeply poor for decades, as collectivized farming kept household incomes low. After Deng Xiaoping took power and relaxed many of the government’s strict economic controls, ordinary people gained the freedom to launch small, scrappy businesses called township and village enterprises. Their rapid growth even caught top party leaders off guard. “Township and village industries grew 20 percent every year,” Deng later told a group of reporters. “This was not something I expected. Nor was it something any of the other comrades foresaw. It took us by surprise.”
Villages across China hunted for gaps they could fill in the global market. Xuchang, for example, leveraged its long history of making hairpieces for traditional Chinese opera, plus the willingness of rural women to sell their long black ponytails, to turn itself into a global hub for wigs. Zhuangzhai became Japan’s largest supplier of caskets, in part thanks to its access to nearby groves of paulownia—a lightweight, slow-burning wood preferred for Japanese cremation rituals. Qiaotou grew into the world’s button-making capital, per local lore, after three brothers found a pile of discarded buttons in a gutter and decided to resell them.
Donghai already had plenty of quartz, a skilled local workforce, and entrepreneurs eager to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Donghai Crystal Museum who now runs training bootcamps for aspiring crystal entrepreneurs, says that in the late 1980s, local artisans modified old washing machine motors to polish crystal necklaces—work that had previously been done entirely by hand. When local raw crystal supplies couldn’t keep up with demand, manufacturers melted down glass from beer bottles to make crystal beads. Locals we spoke to recall that at the peak of the shortage, bars and restaurants across Donghai actually ran out of beer because all the bottles were being repurposed.
Around the same time, unregulated illegal mining spun out of control. All the digging caused roads to collapse and homes to sink, sometimes resulting in injuries and deaths, according to Chinese state media. In late 2001, Donghai county officials announced a major crackdown on unauthorized mining. With domestic crystal supplies tightening, local entrepreneurs began traveling across the globe to source new raw material. As one executive from a local crystal industry group told a newspaper: “Wherever there are raw stones, you will find people from Donghai.”
Kyle Chan, a Brookings Institution fellow who studies Chinese industrial policy, notes that venturing to far-flung corners of the world wasn’t seen as a risky, bold move—it was just how business was done. In China, there’s “this idea, almost a kind of overconfidence, that you can go anywhere in the world and outwork and outmaneuver anyone,” Chan says. Most people don’t “see cultural barriers as actual, insurmountable barriers.”
Wu Qingfeng says Donghai’s traders were stunned by the scale of crystal deposits they found overseas. He explains that they learned about massive deposits across Africa after people from a neighboring province traveled there for a humanitarian project. Some countries had so much quartz that they were using it to pave roads. In Donghai, crystal deposits are small and scattered, Wu says, “but when you go to Madagascar, Zambia, the Congo, other countries, you find local rose quartz is like coal—an entire mountain is made of rose quartz.”
Liu, owner of Big Purple Crystal, says he first started traveling overseas to source amethyst around a decade ago. His first trip was to Brazil. “I bought a cheap plane ticket and brought a translator with me,” he says. “The very next day, I bought my first shipping container—about 20 tons of amethyst.” He struggled to turn a profit at first, so he started looking for opportunities elsewhere. At the sprawling annual Tucson Gem and Mineral Show in Arizona, he came across high-quality Uruguayan amethyst, and decided to travel there next.
One wall of Liu’s warehouse is covered in photos of him posing with Uruguayan diplomats and politicians, including the former president. His biggest complaint about doing business in Uruguay, he says, is the lack of authentic Chinese food. Liu’s daughter, who is studying art school, now also travels to Uruguay for the family business. When local miners dig up an especially high-quality piece, she takes a photo and sends it to one of several industry group chats. “If someone wants it, it sells immediately,” Liu says. “She can flip it same day.”
The Livestreamer-in-Chief
It’s 7 a.m., and the raw crystal flea market in Donghai’s Xingxi village is already packed. Merchants sit in folding camping chairs haggling beside tarps heaped with rough stones. Artisans hold up unremarkable-looking rocks and shine bright flashlights through them to check the quality inside. A livestreamer clutches a big bag of pink crystal bracelets in one hand and shouts into a small smartphone in the other: “200 units for only 9.9 yuan!” An elderly local watching nearby does the quick math in his head—that’s almost $14 for just five minutes of broadcasting. His voice holds a note of awe, and maybe a little envy too.
That livestreamer, Zhao Zhonggang, is the Communist Party secretary of Xingxi, a village of roughly 4,000 people where he estimates 70 percent of residents work in the crystal trade. Online, he goes by the nickname “Crystal Secretary,” and posts videos of his daily life: walking the flea market to help vendors sell their stock, chatting with local elders, playing basketball with village kids. One of the biggest worries for crystal buyers is the risk of buying fakes, and few things build trust faster than an official government title. Local media reports say Zhao’s credibility is so strong that fans have driven across the country just to meet him in person.
Zhao is a distinctly modern Chinese politician, shaped by a system that evaluates officials based on how much the local economy grows under their watch. Here, the line between governing and running a business blurs. Zhao’s office isn’t located in a grand government building—it’s down the hall from a workshop where women string crystal bracelets by hand. Right outside his door sits a stockpile of carved crystal goods: skulls, zodiac animals, even carved crystal phalluses. “Overseas customers prefer these kinds of ‘a bit unusual’ products,” one of Zhao’s employees explains. “There’s basically no market for them here in China.”
Zhao’s path in the crystal business started in 2012, when he became an assistant for a nearby village committee. He noticed that piles of leftover crystal fragments from local workshops were being thrown away unused. Later, under his leadership, villagers started repurposing those scraps into higher-value products. They arranged the tiny pieces into mosaic lamp shades, and sewed them into “healing” pillows and mattresses, generating millions of dollars in sales at home and abroad.
Zhao was transferred to Xingxi in 2019. When COVID-19 lockdowns pushed most commerce online, he launched an account on Douyin—China’s domestic version of TikTok—and quickly gained followers, helping Xingxi earn the nickname “24/7 Livestream Village.” At first, most livestreamers were selling only to domestic Chinese shoppers. But by the next year, the sound of Donghai’s crystals was popping up on smartphones across the U.S. and UK.
Under the glow of ring lights, TikTok livestreamers dipped metal scoops into huge buckets, pulling out amethyst bracelets, chunks of lapis lazuli, and clear quartz towers to drop into baskets and plastic bags. Signs above the sparkling piles invited viewers to pay between $2.99 and $9.99 for their own “lucky scoop.” By the end of 2022, crystals were one of the top-selling products on TikTok Shop globally.
“There was explosive growth,” Liu recalls. “The entire crystal industry was shipping directly to the U.S.” Local residents opened large livestreaming “supermarkets,” where hundreds of streamers could broadcast at the same time. The local government simplified business licensing and compliance rules, and partnered with a state-owned bank to launch a foreign currency settlement program, cutting the cost of selling directly to overseas buyers.
These changes allowed Donghai to upend the traditional crystal supply chain. Instead of passing through layers of wholesalers and retail stores, goods could now go straight from Donghai to international consumers, cutting out middlemen and lowering prices for buyers. “Donghai people took to the internet extremely well,” Liu says. At the height of the boom, Big Purple Crystal could sell an entire shipping container of amethyst in just one or two hours, he says.
Wu Qingfeng, the bootcamp instructor, says this golden age only lasted one to two years. Some companies hired livestreamers with no professional experience and only basic English skills. They would say all kinds of untrue things on camera, Wu recalls, and still sometimes make thousands of dollars a day. But eventually customers started to notice that many different sellers were broadcasting from the same building, Wu says: “Everyone realized: turns out you’re all one big Chinese supermarket.”
Customers started hunting for the lowest possible price, and a brutal price war broke out across Donghai. “This cross-border supermarket model turned into cutthroat, mutually destructive competition,” Wu says. TikTok also started cracking down on scammy, low-quality crystal content, and even the popular lucky scoop format was eventually banned. By summer 2023, he says, many small and medium-sized crystal businesses had started to go under.
The downturn has continued since then. But in Donghai, everyone expects another boom is just around the corner. Inside one local market, a sign advertises “crystal express loans” for local merchants, with flexible repayment terms to keep cash flowing. At a seminar for cross-border sellers, a representative from state-owned telecom China Mobile promoted a service that lets companies bypass China’s Great Firewall to set up shops on international platforms like TikTok and Temu. It was marketed as a government-approved alternative to VPNs, which are heavily restricted in China.
In the U.S., the core strategies Donghai has used—subsidizing local businesses, building shared public infrastructure, and aggressively pursuing global market share—are viewed with deep suspicion. U.S. lawmakers and pundits have framed these tactics not as smart development tools, but as unfair practices that undermine “market-oriented competition” and put American companies at a disadvantage. This rhetoric has shaped a popular narrative about China’s economic growth that is incomplete, reducing it to nothing more than malicious state interference.
But in Donghai, locals told us success most often comes from unapologetic, cutthroat competition. Imitation isn’t stigmatized here—it’s seen as practical. When one person invents a new popular product (think crystals shaped like fairy wings or carved into Pokémon characters), everyone else immediately tweaks the design and starts selling their own version. “This whole very-fast-follower dynamic is something much deeper about China and the Chinese market,” says Chan, the Brookings fellow. Robert Wu, CEO of China-focused market research firm BigOne Lab, contrasts that with the U.S. approach: In the U.S., you “want to do something unique, and if someone else is already doing it, you usually don’t follow.”
Pressing On
Right across the street from Liu’s warehouse sits International Crystal Jewelry City Plaza, a massive shopping mall home to some 7,000 businesses selling everything from stretch bracelet cord to loose emeralds. A flea market is being held out front today, and Wu is prepping 20-some of his bootcamp students for the chaotic trading day ahead.
“When you’re buying at the market, don’t ask the vendor if it’s real or fake—just don’t,” Wu tells the group. “They’ll figure out you can’t tell the difference yourself, so why wouldn’t they scam you?”
Another piece of advice: Don’t be too quick to stock up on inventory, because prices are constantly fluctuating. Right now, he explains, white quartz sells for just 10 to 20 percent of its recent peak price. “What are you supposed to do with that inventory if you bought it when prices were high?” Wu asks. “How much ‘mystical energy’ would you have to add to it just to break even?” He tells the students he recently heard about a crystal factory owner who bought a huge order of white quartz right before prices crashed, and ended up dying by suicide.
A few blocks away, a new kind of glittering industry is growing in Donghai: elaborate, gem-covered press-on nails. Local news outlets hype press-ons as the region’s next signature export, part of a so-called “fingertip economy” focused on small, handmade goods built for livestreaming and fast international shipping. One wholesaler estimates that Donghai already makes roughly 70 percent of China’s press-on nails, churning out around 400,000 sets every day.
At one nail shop, walls are lined with metal racks holding clear plastic packages, each with a set of 10 nails. There are hundreds of designs to choose from, and all cost less than $2. We found ourselves grabbing set after set: shimmery pale pink nails painted with swirling koi fish, a set of long green nails with 3D lotus flowers glued to each thumb. In the corner of the shop is a work station splattered with nail polish and glue, a reminder of the painstaking manual labor that goes into every finished set.
The shop’s owner, a woman in her 40s with a young daughter, tells us she makes $200,000 to $300,000 a year, an income she largely attributes to livestreaming. Business is especially strong in niche markets like Japan and South Korea, where competition is thinner and profit margins are higher. As the owner chats with us and sorts through paperwork, a young female livestreamer stands in front of a rack speaking Japanese into her phone. She holds up a set of nails, tilting them back and forth, as light glints off their surface. The color is just like deep blue quartz—rich and glowing.
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