Stumped by a ban designed to save elephants from extinction, Hong Kong’s master carvers turned to a long dead species that left thousands of tonnes of frozen ivory in Siberian mass graves.
Mammoth tusks, intricately carved to depict anything from devotional Buddhist scenes and teeming wildlife to bizarre erotic fantasies, now make up most of the ivory for sale in the city.
The international trade in elephant ivory, with rare exceptions, has been outlawed since 1989 after populations of the African giants dropped from the millions in the mid-20th century to some 600,000 by the end of the 1980s.
The ban left hundreds of traditional carvers in the south China region facing an uncertain future, until they turned to a global stock of ancient tusks buried mostly in Siberia, but also in Europe and North America.
“I tried wood, stone and hippo teeth as well as mammoth tusks. It was six years after the ban that I started to focus on mammoth ivory,” master carver Chu Chung Shing of Prestige Crafts said.
But it took time to persuade connoisseurs to adopt a taste for the body parts of an extinct species.
“While elephant ivory was widely appreciated, mammoth tusk didn’t have a similar following. The challenge was to educate people to the unique characteristics and value of mammoth ivory,” he recalled.
Today Mr Chu employs 160 carvers in mainland China, and inside his shop on Hong Kong’s renowned Hollywood Road antique strip finely sculptured carvings up to 3.5 metres long, sell for up to a million US dollars. A few doors down, proprietor Amy Wong displays a spectacular $380,000 carved tusk depicting rainforest beasts in her window display at Cho’s Art Crafts.
She turned to mammoth ivory 10 years ago and now employs 90 carvers across the border in mainland China, she said.
Last year Hong Kong customs cleared 21 tonnes of mammoth ivory, on top of the 70 tonnes cleared in the two previous years, according to official data.
More than 90 per cent of it came from Russia’s arctic tundra, and most of it was aged at 10,000 to 40,000 years old, according to information provided by dealers.