In Search of the Hairy Crab

YangCheng Lake lies just outside the North Eastern fringes of the Suzhou Industrial park.  It's a fairly big lake in terms of surface area....covering about 8 square miles or so.  But it's shallow.  In many ways, it is simply a low spot in the flood plain of the Yangtze.  You could probably walk across most sections of the lake.  It's not a spot for water skiers.

But as August gives way to September, YangCheng Lake becomes the focus of the Chinese foodies from the mainland to Hong Kong to Taipei to Singapore.  September is the start of the harvest season for Hairy Crab.  And YangCheng Lake is to Hairy Crab what Champagne is to sparkling wine.  YangCheng has become a Name.  A very valuable name.  A million other lakes produce the same crab but YangCheng Lake is considered to produce the best of the best of these scurrying crustaceans.

In fact, these crabs are so prized that they provide, arguably, the largest opportunity for counterfeit marketing in China.  If you want to make a quick buck you can sell fake Rolex watches or fake Louis Vuitton purses.  But the entrepreneurs who really want to rake in the cash are selling fake YangCheng Lake Hairy Crab.  You see, the crabs from YangCheng lake fetch a far better price than the same crab from 100 miles away.  Five to ten times the price.  For the same doggone crab.

In a typical year, some 10 to 15 thousand tons of YangCheng Lake crab are sold in China or exported to foreign Chinese communities.  However, the lake only produces about 1 to 2 thousand tons.  So in a perfectly statistical world, the odds are 9 out of 10 that your so-called YangCheng crab is really a fake.  The vast majority are outright fakes with cleverly forged authentication documents.  Another fraction can legally be called YangCheng crab even though they were raised somewhere else....and then introduced into the lake only for the last month or so.  (The locals call this "showering the crab in YangCheng Lake".)   

The best way to improve your odds of getting the real YangCheng crab is to go to the lake itself.  The lake is surrounded by hotels that are only occupied during the crab harvest season.  A group of us from work went in early October.  We booked a meeting room at a hotel for a working session in the morning.  Then we took a long lunch. 

There are restaurants that specialize in "authentic" crab.  These restaurants are located on an island/peninsula that juts into the middle of the lake.  From the hotel, we took speedboats out to the island.  The photo at top shows the boats pulling up the the hotel quay.  Then there's  a photo of the dock leading up the island restaurant.  The restaurant had several outdoor tanks filled with live crabs...crabs purportedly coming directly from the lake.  The third and fourth photos show the little fellas in the tanks awaiting their impending doom.  The last photo, above, shows the restaurant workers preparing the live crabs for cooking.  They are wrapping the legs of the crabs with long strings...which is to prevent them from jumping out of the boiling water while cooking and/or doing damage to another crab in the pot.

Oddly enough, at about the same time as our visit there were several English language newspaper stories written about the counterfeit crabs of YangCheng lake.  If you're interested, you can read the one HERE or the one HERE or the one HERE.

In our next episode, we will capture and eat the Hairy Crab.  Cue the music of impending doom.