There are few customers in the Aijia Collection Market near Dazhong Temple, and some shops put up notices such as "Dismantling stalls for sale" and "Seeking cooperation".
Since the beginning of this year, the wenwan market, which has experienced barbaric growth, seems to have entered a reshuffle period, and enthusiastic investors have also entered a cooling-off period. A few days ago, a reporter from Beijing Youth Daily visited the wenwan collection market and found that the phenomenon of empty doors, dumping goods and withdrawing stores was very popular. The industry believes that the decline of the wenwan market is closely related to the downturn of the economic environment, and it is currently in a state of polarization. Currency (ordinary varieties) is becoming less and less valuable, while fine products still have the possibility of maintaining and increasing value.
The wenwan market, once favored by capital and popular for 7 years, suddenly cooled down. The sky-high price Jin Sinan and sky-high price walnuts that have appeared one after another have also plunged into the bottom of the market on a roller coaster. Jin Sinan furniture is on sale at a discount of 30%, and more than 10,000 pairs of three-edged walnuts can be taken away at 5,000 yuan.
Ten thousand yuan of walnuts, 5000 yuan, take away the merchants’ urgent goods.
Located in the Aijia Collection Market near Dazhong Temple, there are almost no customers in the huge store. The further you go inside, the more shops close down, and some shops post notices of "closing stalls and selling" and "seeking cooperation" on the glass. In the classical furniture store, a pair of gold-rimmed nanmu wardrobes behind Mr. Wang are particularly outstanding among the pieces of sour branches and huanghuali furniture, with golden color and clear and elegant water ripple road on the board. "Now you want to buy the right one," he said. "I sold 401 thousand pairs, and now I sell you 100 thousand." Seeing that the reporter of Beiqing Daily was hesitant, Wang Boss chased another sentence and said that he would shed tears and have a big sale: "If you can pay 120,000 yuan, these two wardrobes, plus a pair of plush chairs and a coffee table, are all from Jin Sinan. You can take them all."
"Now the business is not good, losing money, and all the stores have been withdrawn." At the door of the teapot shop, the proprietress with a southern accent lamented that several shops next to her were already closed.
Walking into a wenwan walnut shop, the white-haired proprietress strongly recommended a pair of walnuts to the reporter of Beiqing Daily: "The absolutely wild three-edged rush, if you take it away for 5,000 yuan, I will go flat and not earn you money." The boss sitting next to him took over the conversation: "If this had been two years ago, this pair of walnuts would have sold for more than 10,000 yuan." It has been rumored that when wenwan walnut was the hottest in the past two years, the stall owner who gambled on green walnut in Beijing Shilihe wenwan market could earn nearly 10,000 yuan in half a day, and a pair of walnuts with excellent appearance was the most expensive and could even sell for 300,000 yuan or 400,000 yuan. However, since last year, a large number of star wenwan, which was sought after before, have been cold one after another, even to the point where no one cares, and the price plummeted to a staggering extent. In this regard, many wenwan operators believe that wenwan walnuts are worthless now. One of the important reasons is that the large number of grafted walnuts has made the output of wenwan walnuts soar, and rare varieties have become rare and common varieties. The price drop is an inevitable phenomenon.
Put a splint on walnuts to make rare varieties
Xiaoyu, a girl from Shilihe Yayuan Market, feels the same way about the grafted varieties ruining Wenwan Walnut Market. In the past, she often went to the walnut market in Laishui, Hebei Province to get walnuts. In her impression, most of the wenwan walnuts in previous years were wild, but now there are many grafted varieties or artificially cultivated varieties, which reduces the cost of walnuts.
There are roughly three kinds of grafting and human intervention methods. One is modeling. Take Mantianxing (wenwan walnut variety) as an example. Short piles are very rare and won the favor of players. However, there are very few natural short piles of gypsophila paniculata, so some people put splints on the growing gypsophila paniculata, that is, use boards to clip walnuts and shape them, and cultivate them into popular varieties. The second is to increase production. The yield of wild walnuts is not high, and a tree can produce at most 50 pairs of fruit. So farmers sawed the edible walnut trees, grafted the wild walnut trees, and began to grow fruit after three years of cultivation, and the yield can be doubled. Based on this calculation, 2012 is the most popular time for wenwan walnuts. If grafting starts from that year, 2015 is the time for the first batch of grafted walnuts to bear fruit. The third is beautification. For example, the lines of all over the sky are beautiful, but the piles are high, and the apple’s round lion’s head pile is beautiful. So farmers graft two kinds of walnut trees together, and the fruit that grows combines the advantages of the two varieties and is as beautiful as a hybrid.
In 2013 and 2014, the wenwan walnut market was extremely hot, and rare varieties broke the sky-high price. Xiaoyu told the reporter of Beiqing Daily that when he first entered the business in April 2011, walnuts had already started to catch fire. She often goes to Laishui, Hebei Province to get walnuts, where there is a big walnut market. Generally, large households take walnuts to wrap trees. Take a fancy to a walnut tree and pick one or two walnuts at random for inspection. If the appearance is good, it is big and upright, then wrap a tree. At the hottest time, a tree can sell for 600,000 yuan. The most expensive wenwan walnut sold in Xiaoyu since its establishment is a pair of Wang Yong walnuts with unicorn stripes, with a transaction price of 12,000 yuan. Xiaoyu said, "Little Trigony Walnut has never been seen before, and the price can scare people to death. A couple can sell for 189,000 yuan, but now it is everywhere, all of which are artificially grafted varieties, so the price will naturally come down.". When the reporter of Beiqing Daily visited the market, he saw that a pair of small three-edged walnuts were being sold by the store owner at a price of 5,000 yuan. Although the price of walnuts varies widely due to different products, at least the price of walnuts of the same category has shrunk by more than 90%.
Ordinary Jin Sinan will be used as firewood by farmers.
Yu Dongxing, a senior wenwan investor, told the reporters of Beiqing Daily that there are many reasons why Jin Sinan ebony, which was once hyped to sky-high prices, is now left out by investors.
Yu Dongxing said that a few years ago, there were tens of millions of pieces of ebony in Jin Sinan, and then it was confiscated by the government. Only then did everyone know that there was Jin Sinan. People mistakenly think that Jin Sinan is extinct. So a large number of hot money entered the speculation, and investors flocked to it, and the speculation was very fierce. There are many merchants, many hoarders, and many people who dream of getting rich overnight.
Beginning at the end of 2014, Jin Sinan suddenly failed. "First of all, there are too many things dug up, not as they say, Jin Sinan ebony has disappeared, and this species is gone. In fact, there are many things on Qingcheng Mountain in Sichuan." In addition, Jin Sinan is ornamental, but not practical. The texture of Jin Sinan is very beautiful, including water ripples, raindrops, phoenix tails and gentian. A set of furniture is millions and tens of millions. It is very beautiful to make furniture and has strong ornamental value. "But later found that Jin Sinan has a problem is that the density is low and the texture is soft. There can’t be any bumps, and you can’t even be scratched by your nails, because a slight rub is a deep imprint. "
Yu Dongxing said that now the market in Jin Sinan is polarized, and the ordinary wood dug out has no texture or pattern, so it is basically of little value. Some people joked that in the future, Jin Sinan, whose appearance is not good, may still be dried and burned by farmers. All literary plays that are fried and immediately fall have a characteristic, that is, the output is huge and resources are not scarce at all.
Financial observation
The cooling-off period after the surge of wenwan
Is there an invisible hand in control of the wenwan market? Yu Dongxing, a senior wenwan investor, said that there are several factors to enhance the value. For Jin Sinan, Thuja and Walnut, the huge amount of hot money comes from Fujian and Guangdong, where there are high-grade wooden furniture bases. They want to use this as a driving force, and they have a large amount of money in their hands, and they are constantly looking for suitable targets. As it happens, the sky-high ebony incident in 2011 caught their attention. In addition, there are also local price factors in Beijing. Beijing is the root and weather vane of the national wenwan market, and it radiates the surrounding areas, such as Hebei, Henan, Shandong, Inner Mongolia and Northeast China, and all come to Beijing for goods.
The decline of the wenwan market is not only due to the micro-level reasons such as the destruction of walnuts by grafted varieties, but also to the macro-level reasons such as the economic environment. After overheating, the economy is now in a cooling-off period and polarized. In the past, everyone was chasing up and down. Like stock trading, everyone thought that investment could make money, and it was also good to make money. When the investment reaches a certain level, the market will not meet everyone’s expectations and will naturally cool down.
News memory
What other literary plays are there?
◎ Cook: At the beginning of this year, the wholesale price of 7×9 (single bead 7 mm in diameter and 9 mm in height) Cook chain can be sold for more than 3,000 yuan, and now it is more than 100 yuan. The price fell the hardest.
◎ Xingyue Bodhi: the most popular in 2013 and 2014, 7×9 (single bead diameter 7 mm, height 9 mm), each string of 114 capsules (108 capsules plus 6 capsules) is more than 1,000 yuan. Now the polished ones sell for more than 100 yuan. If it is directly strung together without processing, it will cost tens of yuan each.
◎ Coconut shell: Since 2013, playing with coconut shell strings has emerged in the market. The most precious is the coconut skewers, with a single bead diameter of 9 mm, and a string of 108 pieces is worth more than 5,000 yuan. I can’t even see it now. No one wants it. There are as many coconut shells as you want, as long as you have a bead car machine, you can car as many beads as you want.
◎ Huang Longyu: Originally, it was just a kind of general collection called yellow wax stone. By chance, it won a high price, and its value is said to have increased by nearly 100 times. A decent rough stone was as high as one million yuan. But now Huang Longyu has become an outcast in the market, and its value has plummeted.
Investment story
400,000 bet on whether 3 acres of land can dig up ebony.
Yu Dongxing, a senior wenwan investor. When the price of ebony in Jin Sinan was the craziest, he personally went to the mountainous area of Sichuan to gamble on land. The so-called gambling on land is to value a mountainous area of fellow villagers, predict that some ebony will be buried underground, and then pay a large price to package the land and dig ebony. The investment risk is that the more ebony unearthed, the better. However, if less ebony is dug up, or even no ebony is dug up, then the money will be wasted and the bet will be lost. It is understood that ebony in Jin Sinan and sky-high ebony discovered after the Ya ‘an earthquake in 2011 also appeared at that time. There is a very big market of Phoebe bournei in Ya ‘an. All the Phoebe bournei excavated in Sichuan are sold there in a centralized way. At most, four or five hundred merchants open their doors to operate. The biggest golden nanmu I have ever seen, 27 meters long, was sold by the buyer for 35 million yuan on the spot. This undoubtedly injected a stimulant into the golden nanmu market at that time.
In the spring of 2013, Yu Dongxing went to Ya ‘an Mountain in Sichuan. At that time, the information he got was that farmers here often dug up Jin Sinan ebony when planting potatoes, and they didn’t know how to do it, so they dried these treasures and burned them as firewood. However, this sign alone is far from enough. We are always looking for local people as staff officers. Several conditions can give extra points to the alternative plots, such as earthquakes and mudslides, and Jin Sinan ebony has been dug up in the adjacent plots. At that time, it was difficult to choose land, because all the places with convenient transportation were dug up by foreign investors, so they chose the mountains as the battlefield for digging treasures. The area of the land that is used to gambling is about 3 mu, and the price is 400,000 yuan with the farmers.
When the long mechanical arm of the hook machine scratched down, I always described myself as pleasantly surprised at that time, because from 1.8 meters below the surface to the 27-meter-deep gravel layer, all the layers were ebony. Everyone stood by, gossiping. There must have been crustal movement here before, and hundreds of years of trees fell down and were buried underground along mountain torrents and mudslides.
Originally, I always thought it would be profitable to dig out a few roots, but I didn’t expect that the ebony that was dug up soon became a mountain beside me, which really made him overjoyed. In fact, only a part of the ebony that is always dug up is Jin Sinan, and most of it belongs to other varieties, such as Toona sinensis, Maliu and Qingba, which are all close to carbonized ebony.
Ebony has a characteristic that it can’t be used at that time when it is dug up, because it has been buried underground for hundreds of years and is very wet. It needs to be covered on land and dried in the shade, so it can’t be directly exposed to the sun, otherwise the wood will crack. Generally speaking, Phoebe bournei needs to be dried in the shade for two to three years before it can be opened and made into furniture. Until this time, investors can tell which is Jin Sinan ebony from the texture and fragrance of wood profile.
Dramatically, the second risk of gambling on land appeared. When local farmers saw how many treasures had been dug up in their fields, they immediately became jealous, but they expressed it diplomatically: "Let us dry in the shade for two or three years." Old enough to understand, in fact, people are not allowed to take away all the treasures dug up.
Although Lao Yu only took away 1/5 of all the unearthed ebony at that time, money must have been earned. One third of the ebony brought back to Beijing was Jin Sinan. Jin Sinan furniture is made of aniseed, carvings are made of minor materials, and beads are made of scraps. This investment has always been a great success.
"In fact, I have deep feelings for Jin Sinan, but why didn’t I do it later? It was because a large number of southern hot money came in to do Jin Sinan, and they dug up the coffin, made the coffin board into furniture, or sold all kinds of things. That thing was really unlucky, which really made me unbearable." This edition/reporter Zhao Xinpei
Photography/reporter Wang Zhenlong
