Villages looked for niches they could fill in the global market. The town of Xuchang, for instance, capitalized on its legacy of making hairpieces for opera performers—and on the willingness of rural women to sell their black ponytails—and turned itself into a hub for wigs. Zhuangzhai became the largest supplier of caskets to Japan, in part through its proximity to groves of paulownia, a lightweight, slow-burning wood favored in Japanese cremation ceremonies. The town of Qiaotou became the world’s button-making capital after three brothers found a handful of discarded buttons in a gutter and decided to resell them, or so the story goes. Donghai already had plenty of quartz and skilled labor, as well as entrepreneurs who were willing to experiment. Wu Qingfeng, a former editor at the Crystal Museum who now leads boot camps for wannabe crystal entrepreneurs, says that in the late 1980s, artisans learned to modify washing machine motors so they could polish crystal necklaces, previously a manual job. When there wasn’t enough raw crystal to keep up with demand, manufacturers resorted …