Excerpt:
Cricket Culture in China encompasses a 2000 year history of both singing insects and fighting crickets. Two millennium of tradition may be divided into three eras (Laufer, 1927). From times prior to the Tang dynasty (500 B.C. - 618 A.D.), people only appreciated the cricket's powerful tunes. During the Tang dynasty (618 - 906 A.D.), people started to keep crickets in cages and enjoy their songs while in captivity. Under the Song dynasty (960 - 1278 A.D.), cricket fighting flourished as a popular sport. It is beyond the scope of this paper to produce a complete historic or chronological overview but I would like to expose some of the interesting snippets I have unearthed from the rich garden of cultural entomology in China along with a list of the involved orthopteran species.