The song in the heart of many Chinese comes from insects

BEIJING — Mosquitoes. Flies. Cockroaches. The bugs that thrive in the heat of summer vex Chinese urban dwellers just as they do in most of the world.

But in China, some insects are viewed not as pests, but as pets especially if they sing for their supper.

Chirping bugs like katydids, cicadas and crickets are prized throughout the country, collected by children and old men who keep them in clay vessels or bamboo cages and nourish them with grains of rice and razor-thin slices of green onion.

Crickets are even bred for their fighting prowess, and a pedigreed champion can be worth hundreds of dollars. But typical crooners can be bought from farmers in pet markets for a few dollars.

“Summer isn’t complete without the sound of a singing katydid in your courtyard,” said Mr Wang Xiaoming, 68, a lifelong Beijing resident who lives in a traditional hutong neighbourhood, a warren of narrow alleys that are the last bastion of many Chinese traditions.

In contrast to the soft trill of the field cricket — “the bard of the grass”, one poet calls them — cicadas and katydids produce the kind of deafening hiss that can drown out conversation.

The practice of collecting singing insects is said to have begun 2,000 years ago. They were sought as good-luck talismans, and later as companions for imperial concubines, who kept them in gilded cages and found solace in the plaintive chirps that echoed their own cosseted, lonely lives. The insects are embedded in Chinese culture.

Ancient poems praise their melodious songs, and many idiomatic expressions use crickets and grasshoppers as metaphors for fertility, friendship or the passage of time.

In fact, in Chinese writing, the earliest character for summer takes the form of a cicada, and the one for autumn resembles a cricket.

The keeping of insects faded during the 1950s and 1960s, when Mao Zedong waged war on traditions deemed bourgeois and retrograde.

But it has been revived in recent years by aficionados like Mr Wang, a retired professor of Chinese literature, who is worried about its future.

“Young people would rather play with their phones than an insect,” he said. There is, of course, a downside to befriending singing insects: They are among the most ephemeral of pets.

Most live for just a few months, and even the most pampered katydid will be silenced by the first autumn frost. THE NEW YORK TIMES