从配角到灵魂：一株水草见证广州水族产业崛起From an eighteenth-billed extra to the soul of the tank

English

Do you remember the tank that held either one fish keeping house alone, or a few plastic plants stuck in the gravel, the green itself an afterthought? In those days an imported plant that cost a hundred yuan at a glance, and the equipment around it, belonged to the players who already knew the game. The wheel has turned. The extra that used to stand eighteenth on the cast list — the aquatic plant — is now the soul the tank cannot do without.

CCTV Finance put the aquarium trade in Guangdong alone near forty billion yuan a year. Behind that figure, new scenes of buying broke out all at once. Under the fashion, a new agreement formed, quietly: if you keep a fish, you keep a plant. Even a coffee cup ought to hold one.

A planted tank can be the quiet corner of a home, or company at work. The plant itself is now a topic. On Douyin the hashtag for aquatic plants has reached 990 million plays, and the hashtag for planted tanks has passed 2 billion.

The attention online has moved, as it would, onto the shops. A beginner’s plant that costs a few yuan can run to hundreds of thousands of orders, and a cheap starter set has made a landscape with no apprenticeship into a new pleasure.

For a few yuan you can have the pleasure of making a small world, an ecology that is only beautiful and never argues. Low effort, high feeling: that ease is now an everyday aesthetic for a great many people in the city.

The plant has finished the crossing from the fish’s backdrop to the soul of the view. It is the base of the ecology, a place for the fish to rest, oxygen in the water. It is also the brush: many shapes and colours, a meadow, a forest, a grassland under the surface, and a tank the size of a hand given room to imagine.

An industry that rose from a supporting part is now reshaping how people see, and how they buy. Every version of the story starts in Guangzhou.

Taking root: from importing a plant to breeding one

In the 1990s, as the domestic ornamental-fish market grew, a new taste formed with it. A tank of swimming fish was no longer enough. People wanted a fuller, livelier landscape under the water.

That want turned the trade toward Southeast Asia, rich in species. Native plants from rainforest streams, with the wildness and the life of that water, began to be brought in.

Guangzhou, at the front of China’s foreign trade, with a commercial nose and a ready network, became the natural first landing of that green wave.

Xianjing Aquatic Plants was among the first. Chen Haowen, who runs it, remembers that when her parents’ generation entered the trade in 1995, most of the plants on the market were imported. “For the trade to last, we saw early that we had to grow and breed them ourselves.”

The turn from bringing a plant in to growing it is the step that made Guangzhou’s plant industry adult. Xianjing alone now has 70 mu of growing ground in Conghua.

The industry could not have grown without the research. The Guangzhou Academy of Agricultural and Rural Sciences is still the only institute in the country that studies aquatic-plant germplasm in a systematic way. From the early 1990s it was introducing and developing ornamental plants. “There was no systematic breeding yet,” says the researcher Huang Shaoli, “but the varieties we brought in laid a solid base for the market in Guangzhou, and in the country.”

He points at a plant climbing a piece of wood, making the look of a banyan. “This is jade anubias. It is the first new ornamental aquatic plant bred by the academy, and it filled a blank in breeding research in China.”

The plant is what the name says. The leaves are thick and full, a deep green, and under the light they carry a soft shine like jade.

With jade anubias as the representative, the academy has bred five new varieties, including glory white palm and exquisite anubias. Behind the step from nothing to a wide possibility is one technique: plant tissue culture.

Tissue culture is often called the cloning of a plant. In a sterile laboratory, the fact that a plant cell can become a whole plant means a scrap of leaf or a bud tip can be copied into thousands of plants that are the same. That made production at scale real, kept the market supplied, and pushed the price down to something ordinary people could pay.

“In the early nineties one anubias could sell for tens of yuan, even seventy or eighty. An ordinary household could not keep it,” Huang says. “Now a variety like barteri is three to five yuan. Only when the price is ordinary can ornamental plants really enter ten thousand homes.”

The breeding breakthrough is not the end. To turn today’s advantage — more varieties, and a price people can pay — into a position that will be hard to move, Guangzhou is playing a larger game. The new plan, for 2024 to 2035, for a strong city of modern urban agriculture, sets ornamental fish as a new mark of the city’s specialty farming, and aquatic plants as an important part of that industry.

A bank of specialty aquatic-plant germplasm, with the academy at the technical centre and the city’s plant firms around it, is taking shape faster. Holding the core stock is how Guangzhou means to keep the initiative, and to sit at the top of the competitive map, in the country and beyond it.

Breaking out: the internet, and a new wave of buying

On the buying side, as the internet spread, and especially as livestream selling rose, the logic of the plant market is being rebuilt.

“In recent years the people in the hobby are younger, and almost everything they know comes from online. Whatever a host pushes is what they meet first.” Chen Haowen’s observation is the pattern of the new buyer.

The change has even altered what pleasure means. “Those of us who have been in the trade a long time used to think the pleasure was watching the form change. A palace-type plant, and the way its leaves above the water slowly become the prettier leaves below: that was a wait worth having,” Chen says. “New players, led by the livestream, want the look at once, and they want it easy.”

The demand was answered quickly on the supply side. Chen Fang, of Fangfang Aquatic Plants, says plainly that they started making “clump plants” in order to go with the current.

“We did not used to make clump plants. Because the livestreams caught fire, we cleared a shed to grow them. You take it home, put it in the tank, and the view is there. It is easy, and it suits a beginner who cannot build a landscape. We call it the beginner’s happy plant.”

A clump plant is grown in a ball of soil or a medium. It grows fast, the roots are strong, and the whole clump can go into the tank. It makes a view the moment it is in, which is why it sells.

The internet did not only change taste. It widened the market. “There used to be very few livestreams in the aquarium trade. In the last two years related videos have reached well over a billion plays, and that has spread what people know of the trade,” Chen adds.

The main buyer has also widened, from retired people in their fifties and sixties to the household. “Parents bring children now, and let them choose the materials, the way you would choose a pet, to grow an interest and a sense of responsibility. A wider public is a large help to the whole industry.”

The change at the counter is travelling back to the breeding bench. Large, rare plants that need a demanding setup, the ones experienced keepers used to want, are giving way to small plants that are easy to keep, which is what a wide market wants. The academy has seen the turn and adjusted the direction of its breeding.

In front: good ground, and a following wind

“The whole country comes to Guangzhou for plants now, and ours also go out to Singapore.” Chen Fang, from inside the trade, has felt the change in where Guangzhou sits.

From depending on imports to supplying the country and selling overseas; from a backdrop in the tank to a chain of its own, from research through growing to the sale: in that crossing, from being led to leading, from ornament to support, Guangzhou’s plant trade has taken the front of the country.

Behind it, the climate is a warm bed. Guangzhou is subtropical and mild through the year, so the plants can grow almost without a stop. That cuts the cost of heating in winter, and from the start it gives a cost advantage and a steady capacity that are hard to match.

A sharp commercial nose is the compass. Breeding institutes shift new varieties toward what a wide public finds beautiful. Growers see the demand, in a livestream, for a landscape that does not ask for skill. Research at the top and selling at the bottom move together quickly, so a market want becomes a real new product at once. The flexibility is striking.

The rise of the plant trade was planted from the start inside Guangzhou’s much larger ornamental-fish ecology. It was born inside that circle, and it shares the customers and a logistics network that was already mature.

In Guangzhou a hobbyist can buy the fish, the plant, the tank, and the equipment in one place. Fairs such as the Great Wall show open a window from that circle onto the world, so a new landscape and a new plant can be tested here quickly, and then travel.

The force of the cluster takes the dependence of plant and fish as far as it will go. That is why Guangzhou’s plant industry can stand in the current, rise with it, and keep opening more room to grow, a steady green life for the world inside a tank, in the country and beyond it.