CE06 聽秋 Ting Qiu - Listening to Autumn                       

From the liner notes [3]

The trade in crickets as pets was already quite widespread in China in the Song and Ming dynasties, and in the Qing dynasty 清 (1644 – 1911 AD) it is mentioned increasingly more often in literature. In the “Records of a Year’s Events in Beijing”, Yanjing Suishiji 燕京歲時記, by Fucha Dunchong 富察敦崇, there is a record of how Golden Bell crickets from Yizhou 易州 are considered the most elegant. They are most fitting for lofty halls and high mansions as their refined melodious singing fills the night in a most pleasing way. Traditionally the sellers who bring these crickets to the city markets claim they come from the dry fields of the Ming tombs.

Wang Shixiang 王世襄, among many other things a specialist on gourds and crickets, claims that they are actually everywhere to be found. He also remarks that even though they, unlike other crickets, like to stay in groups, they are very hard to catch. They hide among rubble and in the brush of the thorny creepers. To catch them, you cut a melon in halves and scrape out most of the fruit flesh, place the halves open side down on small pebbles of equal size and wait until the second watch. When you turn the melon halves over they will be full of crickets much resembling the rounded, elongated, black melon seeds.

The Chinese not only caught crickets in the wild, but also learned to hatch and breed them so they could keep them out of season. There is a deep understanding of the differences in timbre between various species and between crickets hatched at different times of the year. For instance, katydids of the summer sound so piercing they can only be enjoyed at a distance and are best given to a neighbour’s child so one can listen from a safe place, whereas the same species hatched in winter sounds much more mellow; what was shrill is now much more sonorous and pleasing to the ear of a refined person, and more enjoyable up close.

It was and still is indeed a very costly pastime – not to mention in detail all the daily chores involved with cricket breeding, like cleaning the poplar bark and large stoneglaced urns, and all the feeding. And if for instance we just concider the heating nesessary to bring up melodiously singing crickets from eggs in the freezing cold environment of Beijing in the wintertime: one old cricket breeder I know spends a fortune on coal each winter to keep the hatching room at a constant temperature of 33 °c, while his and his family’s living quarters are kept at only 14–16°c. This is of course reflected in the high prices one has to pay per individual cricket in February–March. In the old days it was common for wealthy people to put up the money for heating, and in return they got the first pick of the best crickets: the so called “sixteen valuables” 十六太寶, i.e. the crickets that not only sang well but had antennae and all six legs intact, wide wings, a good colour and so on.

Chinese Cricket Culture

The tradition of keeping crickets for their singing skills is documented at least as far back as the Tang dynasty 唐 (618–907 AD). The ladies of the imperial court would collect them and keep them in their private quarters in more and more elaborate cages, to have some company through the long, lonely autumn nights. The moon, the wind and the crickets.

During the Song dynasty 宋 (960–1279 AD), we find more and more mentions of this pastime, and general Jia Sidao 賈似道 (1213–1275 AD), in charge of the security of the country’s borders, is severely reprimanded in history for being so obsessed with crickets that he neglected his duties in a most reprehensible manner and failed to defend the borders from the onslaught of the northern barbarians because he refused to leave a cricket fight.

From the reign of Xuan De 宣德 (1426 – 1435 AD), in a period considered the most brilliant of the whole Ming dynasty (1368– 1644 AD), the Emperor Xuanzong 宣宗 (actual name Zhu Zhanji 朱瞻基) is remembered as a keeper of the peace and a great promoter of culture, despite his short reign of only nine years and seven months – and despite the fact that he was so occupied by his favorite pastime of cricket fighting that he made wild crickets from different regions one of the most important tributes to the court. Magistrates were ordered to send out farmers and troops to comb the fields for the best specimens instead of enforcing law and overseeing production.

Even cultivating the fields was sometimes neglected – something that can still be felt today in parts of Shandong and Anhui provinces, where peasants are able to get a better income from catching crickets than from farming. passing ones time with crickets can be both elegant and simple in all walks of society.

There are two main schools of “cricketeers” in China, the first being the large and noisy group who keep crickets mostly for hazard and gambling, which must by all standards be considered a vice. The second certainly is a more peaceful group, who keep the crickets only for listening, and for the beneficial effects their singing has on one’s mental well-being. It is a measurable stress reliever, and we may consider the natural circumstance when we would enjoy the sound in the wild: typically after a heavy thunderstorm, when the sun comes out again to dry the leaves and grass, we hear the reassuring sound of crickets proclaiming that all is again calm and peaceful. I have confirmed this emotion with representatives from many different cultural backgrounds, and there seems to be a universal consensus that crickets singing equals safety and peace.

Created at Bolingo Productions in Sweden, copyright Lars Fredriksson | Latest revision Saturday 7 October, 2006.