They were plucked from the fields, the ones with the blackest faces, largest bodies, and loudest singing voices. And now they will fight, perhaps to a death by decapitation, quite possibly to a loss of limbs. They fight neither for money or glory, though both are usually involved. They know only that another male stands before them. The urge to claim mating territory, more primordial than hatred, drives them to combat.

Those close to the cricket arena get a gladiatorial spectacle easier to follow than the cyclone of feathers that is a cock-fight, and more elegant than the snap and gore of a dog-fight. One combatant may employ the "creeping tiger, striking snake" style, stalking his opponent and blitzing in a moment of weakness. Another waits until his enemy chirps to attack, engaged wings yielding a slight advantage. But the greatest champions are "driving wind" fighters, sweeping down on their opponents like a one-bug swarm.

In the cricket markets of Beijing, Shanghai, and Guangzhou, trainers pay top RMB for good specimens, thousands for likely talent, up to a hundred thousand for an obvious champion. Such born winners bear superior pinzhong, 140 telltale points from abdomen markings to jaw size that a well-trained eye will use to distinguish a Mike Tyson among so many Glass Joes. Bought in the warm growing days of summer to mid-autumn, the crickets will feast daily on proprietary diets, blends of flies and blood-gorged mosquitoes, corn and wheat millet, ginseng and calcium tablets.

Good masters give their crickets the same fierce love any coach has for his hopeful. Day after day, for hours on end, crickets-in-training know the discipline of the straw, goaded unceasingly until their primitive instincts are honed for attack, front and side legs working in perfect concert. The trainer watches his charge with brood hen intensity for signs of disease or malaise. In contrast to human gladiators, crickets-in -training know carnal pleasure. New females, a kuai or two at the market, are introduced daily, their presence a stimulant that only fuels a fighter's aggression.

Yet there is a Darwinian final exam before a cricket is deemed worthy of the arena - winter. His Spartan home, a foam-padded box that protects against harmful jolts, is left outside as temperatures drop. The minority of crickets who succumb would not have provided good sport. After the big chill, and as the day of reckoning approaches, survivors go on a few days' fast, then are fed red ants to turn them fiery.

After half a century or more under ban, cricket fighting is again officially sanctioned, as long as money isn't involved. But of course it's not to be imagined that high-level cricket combat goes on under the shady auspices of aught other than organized gambling. A wad of money wagered intensifies the proxy thrill of all competition, but especially so when lives are at stake, even ones so tiny and otherwise inconsequential as crickets'.

So in the sort of back-alley dens where high-stakes card games are sanctioned, big money trades hands in wager over the fight card. Then again, such sleazy venues are a grim necessity in big cities, where police protection is hard-bought. A few years ago, a bust in Kowloon led to the arrest of over a hundred, and the confiscation of both winnings and bugs.

Out in the country, where outsiders are discerned sooner than uppity cops, the "luxury games" are held, events with some of the flavor left from a millennium's accumulated pageantry. Top crickets from all corners of the Middle Kingdom meet at rural venues, red banners in their corner and names in gold letters. The number of ritual observances approaches that of a bullfight, so that there is both pride and drama in the flailing antennae and clashing jaws. Even limbless, oozing ichor, a cricket battles on with no thought of quarter, a code rare given the arthropod tendency to scatter at the first sign of danger. Thus did the idle rich of the Song Dynasty think to make warriors of their soothing song bugs.

If authorities have little respect for the cricket-fighting legacy, the farmer appreciates it as one of those rare opportunities in China wherein his country locale is an advantage. The search for new blood is big business, and not any field cricket will do.  Pudong has long been a proven ground for natural fighters. Many a Shanghai scout would comb the pepper fields near Hangzhou, where crickets were said to be as fiery as their environs.

But Shandong's Ningyang county is to cricket fighting what the Dominican Republic is to baseball. Many of Ningyang's people make their living from what are commonly acknowledged as the best raw talent in all of China. Besides finding and transporting, there are research institutes and breeding concerns, as well as the associated industry of catering to the half-million who travel to Ningyang every year in hopes of finding the next most dangerous cricket on the planet. For humans, we're told to tell ourselves, nurture trumps nature. For crickets though, as for racehorses, success is determined at conception.