A wealthy cricket collector squats near his BMW SUV to look at crickets on sale. Every August tens of thousands of cricket enthusiasts from major cities flock to rural Shandong, a place famed for its strong and ferocious crickets, to look for champions. The crickets, some fetching hundreds even thousands of dollars, are then fought in late September, drawing what insiders estimate to be some 25 to 35 million dollars a year.