In Foreign Parts: Cricket craze sparks drug abuse, betting scams and bad memories

China is going cricket mad but the sport, overshadowed by politics, is plagued by doping scandals and illegal betting, says a top umpire, Professor Wu Jichuan.

"We have some ten million fans in China alone," says Professor Wu, the author of several books on a passion dating to the emperors of the 8th-century Tang dynasty.

A slight, intense figure with thick pebble glasses, he is trying to organise an international festival of cricket fighting. These days the government takes a more relaxed attitude to what some other countries might regard as a blood sport. It was outlawed as a bourgeois pastime during Chairman Mao's Cultural Revolution.

Fans are making the most of the tolerance. They are spending as much as 100,000 yuan (£8,000), or ten times the average urban salary, to train or buy top competitors. Spectators are ready to fly all over the country to watch the best matches.

"That's a lot of money when you think even world champions don't last longer than a season," Professor Wu observed. He brought out one of his favourites, an ugly brute who sidled backwards and forwards with a coiled intent. "This is the Chinese Mike Tyson – he can finish off any opponent by biting off their head," he said.

"People used to do it just for fun but now it is very intense and competitive, like heavyweight boxing. Some rely on special techniques, like Shaolin monastery martial arts or Japanese Sumo wrestling," he expounded.

The sport has its gentler side. Professor Wu has a collection of ink portraits with verses eulogising famous champions. He believes cricket fighting has a civilising influence and that it should be exported worldwide.

In the 15th century, emperors became so obsessed with fielding the best teams that ministers introduced a cricket tax. Instead of delivering a share of the harvest as a grain tax, peasants had to collect the best crickets and give them to cricket-assessing mandarins. "Failure to pay the tax was a capital offence in the Ming dynasty," the professor noted.

Not all crickets are kept like gladiators. Many are cherished because they are expert musicians whose exquisite, plaintive sounds have earned them golden or ivory cages.

Some Beijingers nurture them in carved gourds, placing them close to the skin to keep them warm through the winter and preserve the elegiac sound of summers past. Such cricket homes can be works of art and prices have risen steeply in recent years to several hundred thousand pounds. The earliest are 7,000 years old.

Professor Wu, known as China's "cricket sage", says the sounds are a means of communication. "Just by listening to them, I can tell what the cricket is thinking about," he said.

China's first cricket festival was held in 1991 and Professor Wu is hoping to organise the international festival this summer either in Beijing or in Shandong province.

Shandong is where, at the foot of the sacred Mount Taishan, a Song dynasty emperor, fleeing in haste from northern invaders 800 years ago, scattered his cricket collection. Since then the best fighters have been found in Ningjing county, home to one of the most popular cricket festivals.

Professor Wu is trying to attract participants from South-east Asia, Japan and Korea but recalls that, in the past, such events became ugly exhibitions of nationalism.

"During the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, the Japanese pitted their champion against a Chinese cricket. If the Japanese won, the Chinese would have to turn east and kow-tow," he said. Only after a battle lasting all day did the wounded Chinese cricket, which lost four of its six legs, finally triumph.

These days many Chinese will wager big money on the outcome even though any form of gambling remains strictly forbidden. With so much riding on the outcome, Professor Wu is often called to act as umpire.

As a professor of biochemistry, he is often forced to test the insects to ensure that no artificial performance enhancers are used. "It's like the Olympics. We have a lot of drug problems these days," he said.

His expertise in the art of preserving insect specimens has also brought him to the attention of China's secret services. After Chairman Mao died in 1976 the Communist Party wished to preserve and display his corpse, like Lenin's on Red Square.

Professor Wu was summoned to advise on how to restore the corpse to its natural appearance. Today, in Beijing's Tiananmen Square, every two days Mao's mummy is lowered underground and sprayed afresh with his bath of chemicals. "He can now be kept for another 100 years," Professor Wu says.