It’s unlikely that many Westerners have heard of the sport of “cricket fighting.” In China, it’s a household name.
According to some historians, the sport dates back to 8th century China, during the reign of the Xuan Zong of the Tang Dynasty. By the 1100’s, a sophisticated culture of cricket fighting had taken root, with various handbooks and manuals written on the topic and its appeal spanning from commoners to the ruling class. The sport was briefly outlawed during China’s cultural revolution (1966-1976) but has since experienced a resurgence in popularity.
In its essence, the sport is simple: two crickets of similar weights are placed in a small container and spar with each other until one emerges victorious. As with most sports, however, the devil is in the details.
How ‘Winning’ Fighting Crickets Are Selected
Sourcing competitive crickets has become something of a science. Traditionally, Chinese cricket trainers would obtain their crickets from the surrounding countryside of whatever city they inhabited. However, modern thinking suggests that the most robust crickets originate from the Shandong province, an eastern coastal region south of Beijing.
Large cricket markets are set up in major cities like Beijing and Shanghai, where participants can purchase the crickets they believe to be strongest from cricket hunters and traders. Most trade happens in the fall, when crickets are thought to be fully mature and at their strongest.
Tradition suggests that crickets with the largest head and mouths, proportional to their body, are optimal competitors–something that science has confirmed via experimentation.
For instance, a 2008 study published in PLOS ONE conducted a series of experiments that pitted field crickets against each other in combat scenarios. The researchers controlled for the size and weight of the insects and paid specific attention to head and mandible size. They found that male crickets with proportionately larger weaponry (head and mouth size) won more fights—and that increasing differences in weaponry size increased the odds of success of the male with the larger head and mouth.
How Fighting Crickets Are Cared For
Beyond selecting a “quality” cricket, caring for them has also become something of a science. Fighting crickets are housed in a small ceramic container called a xishuaipen. The older the container, the more it is prized, as it is believed that newer containers release substances that can harm the crickets health. Inside the container exists a bedroom of sorts, called a lingfang, and a food and water bowl (which are removed with tweezers to avoid contact with the cricket).
A fighting cricket’s diet varies based on the experience and preferences of its owner. Here is how one researcher describes it:
“Basically, any food that is edible for human beings can be given to crickets. Some people grind such things as fish, prawn heads, crabmeat, lean pork, frog legs, fish bones, snake meat and pork liver, and mix it with rice porridge as the staple diet of their crickets. […] Cooking methods are also diverse: some people insist on heating everything whereas others insist on giving the food raw.”
Many factors go into the planning of a fight. For one, highly accurate scales are used to measure the crickets’ weights and pair the crickets for a fair fight. Sometimes, crickets are heated with a blow dryer or fed laxatives to “drop weight” before a match. There are also rules that fighting crickets must sometimes be kept inside of sealed cages for up to 12 hours before a fight to avoid any tampering, as some cricket owners have been known to “dope” their crickets before a fight to enhance their chance of victory.
When the fight occurs, it is usually a “best-two-out-of-three” scenario. Crickets are placed in a small, oval-shaped ring called a douzha. A winner is chosen when a cricket runs away or beats his wings in a signal of victory.
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