Taiwanese orchids are becoming the contraband of choice for Chinese officials looking to make a quick buck, sources in the Ilan County orchid industry said.
Less conspicuous than illicit drugs, bank wires or cold, hard cash, orchids fetching hundreds of thousands of US dollars per blossom on the black market are fast becoming synonymous with cross-strait money laundering and bribery, Ilan County Orchid Association chairman Kao Feng-yue (
Currying favor
More and more local businessmen and businesswomen eager to curry favor with Chinese movers and shakers, for example, are smuggling rare, locally grown orchids into China to use as gifts for powerbrokers there, Kao said, adding that the Chinese officials in turn tended to sell off the orchids at drastically inflated prices.
The Liberty Times cited an unnamed Taiwanese businessman yesterday who said he used orchids to bribe a Chinese prison warden to transfer him to more comfortable quarters during his prison sentence in China.
The jailed businessman's family sent a collection of pricey orchids to the warden, who later sold them for a fat profit, the businessman said.
Other Chinese officials, the report added, sell orchid "gifts" from Taiwanese businesspeople for foreign currency.
Crackdown
The crackdown on corruption by officials and Communist Party members initiated by Chinese President Hu Jintao (
The crackdown has only driven the trade further underground, it said.
The fact that only orchid aficionados tend to have any inkling of the market value of certain orchids further boosts their appeal among Chinese officials and Taiwanese businesspeople.
This makes the plants ideal "tools" for the illegal transfer of wealth.
Token gifts
"Even in full view, these flowers can usually be passed off as merely token gifts," the report said.
With a value of NT$500,000 (US$15,180) for each blossom, the "Lanyang Peony," a newly discovered orchid species from the mountains of Ilan County, is the latest popular contraband item, supplementing the old favorites of rare art and artifacts, that are being actively smuggled to China, Kao said.
The chairman said that one local dealer sold two whole Lanyang Peonies recently for the equivalent of hundreds of thousands of US dollars.
While Taiwanese orchids are cultivated for the domestic market, most are sold abroad, with the Chinese market a major destination, Kao said.
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