The Mysterious Tree Branch Snapping Poles of China

The New Yorker’s Evan Osnos has a post on his blog wondering about mysterious poles coming over his wall and snapping at the fruit trees in his Peking courtyard (it is fitting he has something as grand these days in Beijing as a courtyard with fruit trees given that his illustrious predecessor Emily Hahn had a rather nice flat in Shanghai and a pet gibbon). However, this is nothing new and a long and well preserved tradition despite the general decimation (or more) of trees in cities like Peking and Shanghai. Carl Crow suffered a similar problem in the 1930s:

‘Crow later recalled that he got through about a dozen gardeners during the time he resided at Connaught Road (now Kanding Road). He found that when it came to maintaining his garden he was required to give very precise instructions if he needed a branch cut or a hedge trimmed. He assumed that a country with a history such as China’s where wood had long been hoarded most gardeners considered simply lopping of branches to tidy the garden a sinfully great waste. Crow observed that others had this problem too and that Shanghai’s private gardens were “full of privets and other shrubs which have grown into trees of monstrous size and of hideous aspect, but no Chinese gardener will touch them.” This desire to preserve fuel though had another side to it and during the winter Crow and his gardeners had to be constantly on the look out for “a class of thief none of us heard of as existing in any other part of the world” who would come along at the dead of night with a long bamboo pole with a steel hook on the end of it and start surreptitiously cutting and purloining the limbs of trees for sale as fuel. This unique Shanghai crime rose to manic proportions when the temperature fell below freezing and branches broke easily and then disappeared almost entirely in the summer months when the more flexible branches were tricky to snap.’

Tree thieves are still with us it seems!

The story is contained in Crow’s Foreign Devils in the Flowery Kingdom available here