Large Yellow Croaker: From Beachcombing to Aquaculture – A Condensed History of China’s Seafood
“When the yellow croaker lands, ten thousand taels of gold appear.” The wild large yellow croaker is a traditional banquet dish and an auspicious centrepiece in Zhejiang and Shanghai. Along China’s coastline, perhaps no fish has a fate more turbulent than the large yellow croaker’s.
This October, in Ningde, Fujian Province, I witnessed a night-time harvest of large yellow croaker.
The night-time harvest caters to the market’s preference for a croaker that is golden from head to tail. The large yellow croaker derives its golden hue from pigment glands in its skin, but the colour breaks down and fades rapidly under ultraviolet light, so the same fish fetched at night or by day commands an entirely different price.
By seven or eight o’clock, as dusk settles, the skilled sorting workers the farm owners have hired from the village are already at their stations, and supervisors from every distribution channel step aboard at the same time to assess the large yellow croaker in their own offshore fishing rafts.
The fishermen haul the cage nets up from the water, and the frame reveals a catch entirely ablaze with gold. The water erupts in a chorus of croaking. Beside the net cages, enormous ice-water vats stand ready: once a croaker is scooped up in a landing net, it must be plunged swiftly into the ice-water vat and covered with a light-blocking red cloth.
The large yellow croaker holds its golden colour, lapses into a faint in the ice water for barely ten minutes, enters a semi-dead state, and is ready for sorting and boxing. This is followed immediately by a production line of weighing, grading, icing and packing that runs until midnight. These croakers will flow into every major sales channel; within days, they will be served on tables in major city restaurants.
In recent years, wild large yellow croaker has hit the headlines as a “sky-priced fish” at several thousand yuan a jin, in stark contrast to the “vegetable melon” and “half-melon”.
The same species of fish, yet prices worlds apart – how did that come about? The story must begin more than fifty years ago.
I. “Extinction-Level Fishing”: From Cabbage-Price to Sky-Price
That wild yellow croaker sold for the price of cabbage was inseparable from the widespread adoption of a particular harvesting technique known as the qiaogu method.
Qiaogu – colloquially shortened to “bamboo-knocking” – can be traced back to the Ming and Qing dynasties. Two mother boats and dozens of smaller vessels form a ring and beat bamboo boards fastened to their hulls, tightening the circle until a set distance is reached; then the beating intensifies, stunning the croaker, which are then hauled up together.
Once fishers in Zhejiang had adopted this low-cost, high-efficiency harvesting method, local croaker catches soared. The peak came in 1974, when Zhejiang Province organised several large-scale harvests deep into the overwintering grounds of the large yellow croaker in the open sea; in the East China Sea alone, the catch of large yellow croaker reached 190,000 tonnes.
The qiaogu method guaranteed an ample and cheap supply of large yellow croaker, but at a devastating cost – “extinction-level fishing”. In any sea area where the method was used, croaker of every size were stunned indiscriminately, and wild large yellow croaker stocks began a precipitous collapse. Under that crushing fishing pressure, by 1988 the nation’s actual yellow croaker yield had fallen below 20,000 tonnes, and since 1990 it has been virtually impossible to form a seasonal fishing run.
In the memories of older Shanghainese, the large yellow croaker was both an auspicious dish – a centrepiece for bringing good luck – and an absolute must at a banquet. The croaker had to be a fine specimen; back when stocks were bountiful, a single fish of three or five jin was unremarkable. Yet from the 1990s onwards, wild large yellow croaker vanished from Shanghai dining tables for years on end.
Scarcity breeds value. The wild large yellow croaker, once as cheap as cabbage, has in recent years routinely fetched several thousand yuan a jin.
In January 2022, a fishing boat off Xiangshan in Zhejiang hauled in nearly 4,000 jin of wild large yellow croaker in a single net, selling the whole catch for ¥9.57 million – over ¥2,000 per jin. In the winter of 2023 as well, village fishermen in Ningbo, Zhejiang, caught a 67-centimetre-long wild large yellow croaker weighing 4.8 jin near Zhongyangshan Island in Ninghai Bay, Xiangshan Port, and sold it for ¥26,600.
II. From “Reaping the Sea” to Aquaculture
Today, the large yellow croaker is China’s most farmed marine fish by volume. According to 2022 data, Ningde’s output accounted for 96 per cent of China’s total large yellow croaker production, with yields tripling over the decade.
Cage aquaculture remains the most prevalent method of farming large yellow croaker.
In the early days, most farms relied on small floating net cages: simple in construction, inexpensive to set up, and requiring a low threshold of skill. But this equipment was rudimentary, poorly able to withstand wind and waves, and could only operate in shallow inshore bays. Overloaded, densely packed cages brought a cascade of environmental consequences: poor water circulation, uneaten feed sinking and fouling the seabed, and vastly exceeding the ecological carrying capacity of the sea area, which raised the risk of red tides and severely disrupted the marine ecosystem.
Since certain nearshore zones were placed under no-farming restrictions, the area devoted to ordinary cage aquaculture has been gradually shrinking. The more mainstream method today is the continuous-frame net cage.
Continuous-frame net cages offer better resistance to wind and waves and can be deployed further offshore than floating net cages, reaching more distant shallow-water sites.
Continuous-frame net cages linked together form fishing rafts. They are remarkably stable underfoot and can even accommodate dwellings; a fisherman’s daily work and life take place right there. Ningde fishermen typically keep a home on shore, so they figuratively refer to going out to the rafts as “going down”.
Anyone who has eaten wild large yellow croaker can tell the difference at first bite: the wild fish is delicate in texture, clean and fragrant without any off-flavour, low in fat, with flesh that falls apart in natural, garlic-clove-like segments. Farmed large yellow croaker, by contrast, carries an earthy, muddy smell and a general off-flavour; the body is round and plump, the flesh greasy and loose, with a distinctly artificial character.
Naturally, that gap in flavour is mirrored in price. Devoted traditional diners harbour a litany of complaints about farmed large yellow croaker and hold fast to the mythology of the wild fish, driving wild croaker prices ever higher. In Ningde, the capital of large yellow croaker farming, a one-jin wild large yellow croaker commands over twenty times the price of a farmed one of the same size.
Within that vast price gulf, the “semi-wild large yellow croaker” emerged by market demand.
III. From Farming to “Semi-Wild”
The new challenge for contemporary croaker farmers is how to raise the fish well: how to add value, ward off price collapses, and bring farmed croaker as close as possible to their wild counterparts.
To produce a large yellow croaker with a finer texture and greater added value, farmers need to let the fish “eat less and move more” in water conditions closer to those of the wild.
The head of Ningde’s “rewilding” large yellow croaker farming base told me that, to preserve the croaker’s texture, they try to replicate the growth conditions the fish would experience in the wild – low stocking density, reduced feeding, high activity levels, large water volumes, and strong currents. This demands far more meticulous management: to follow the fish’s natural growth cycle, feeding stops when temperatures drop; during spring tides, the faster water flow gives the fish more exercise, and only then is supplementary feed provided.
As a result, unlike their intensively farmed counterparts, these semi-wild large yellow croaker grow much more slowly – a single 1.5-jin semi-wild large yellow croaker takes four years to reach that size.
Semi-wild large yellow croaker raised by enclosure net or deep-water net cage do offer superior quality and richer returns, but the risks are greater and the costs higher. Moreover, the “semi-wild yellow croaker” category is still new to the market, and farmers must simultaneously tackle the challenge of promoting the product to buyers – a chain that stretches extremely long. Small-scale producers simply lack the capacity to enter on their own and can mostly join only by collaborating with larger groups.
If on land one could still practise meticulous cultivation with as little as one mu of land, ocean farming is decidedly a game of capital and resources: resources become ever more concentrated, the head effect is pronounced, and small producers struggle to claim a share.
“Semi-wild” is merely a market term, used to describe croaker occupying a state between purely farmed and purely wild. There is no actual production standard behind it: the fish may come from an upgraded traditional net cage, or from high-cost, intensive rearing in enclosure nets or deep-water net cages. At present, the market still lacks finer grading systems and a traceability system for large yellow croaker farming.
IV. Draining the Pond to Catch Every Fish
After all the twists and turns, having come full circle, the anchor of the croaker’s value seems never to have shifted: it is “wildness”.
I have eaten wild large yellow croaker, and that delicate, pure flavour is, I feel, the very taste of nature itself. I often grumble that farmed fish tastes of fishiness and lacks character, and having traced those off-flavours to their source, having examined every farming method used for the large yellow croaker, I cherish the wild fish and seafood still available to me all the more.
It is poignant that, after the era of crude plunder of resources, modern people can only approach “the flavour of nature” through ever-greater investment and ever-rising cost.
Had we foreseen where we would end up, why would we ever have set out?
[1] “大⻩⻥养殖” Fujian Provincial Department of Science and Technology, 2004 · Beijing
[2] “不同养殖模式及流通方式的大黄鱼品质 评价和等级判定” 2022, Shi Yuzhuo
[3] “营养与养殖大黄鱼品质之间关系的初步研究” Ma Rui, 2014
[4] “8天近16亿尾大黄鱼苗倒入大海! 140多家苗场自发签订放生协议, 能否扭转烂市?” Daguo Yuye, 2019
Images by the author and from the internet
Editor: Ze’en