Chinese Visitors Fuel Kingdom’s Ivory Market

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Khmer Times/James Reddick

After declining for years, Cambodia's ivory market may be reappearing.

In November 2014, Trang Nguyen was preparing a survey to study the scope of Cambodia’s domestic ivory market. That year, three major busts – including one in which more than three tons of African ivory were seized at Sihanoukville Autonomous Port – had put the Kingdom back on the radar as a potential hub for ivory trafficking. As the poaching of Cambodia’s elephants has slowed since the early 2000s, so too has the sale of ivory in local markets. In 2013, the NGO TRAFFIC announced there was “falling demand” for ivory in the country after surveying local markets.

But Nguyen, a Vietnamese conservationist and a researcher at the University of Cambridge, suspected that the current influx of Chinese tourists to Cambodia might have refueled the local trade. So that November, before conducting her study, she hopped on a Chinese tour bus from Ho Chi Minh City to Phnom Penh.

As the grand finale of the tour, the bus stopped at a hulking jewelry shop on Monivong Boulevard that also sold antiques and other luxury decorative items. Among them: large amounts of ivory on full display. “People were really openly trading ivory and openly talking about it,” she says. “I wasn’t working on the project yet but I wanted to see what would happen. There were Chinese tourists who had already bought ivory from somewhere and they were showing it off to the seller, saying ‘Oh, I bought this one. It’s a lot better than what you are offering.’”

Eight months later, Nguyen, in partnership with Fauna and Flora International, did a systematic survey of stores in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. She would tell shop owners that she was looking for ivory for her grandfather in Vietnam, who she told them works as an ivory carver. Because of stricter enforcement in Vietnam, she would say, she was looking for a business partner in Cambodia to get material back across the border. “Sometimes they’re not really interested, especially the Chinese. They just care if you buy it or not. But for the Cambodians, some of the places where they carve ivory or they have connections to the carving workshop would be like ‘oh, how much do you want to buy? What kind of ivory are you looking for?’

On her first survey, conducted over two weeks in July 2015, Nguyen says that she was surprised by the relative scarcity of shops selling real ivory. Whereas in 2013 TRAFFIC researchers had found 48 stores in the capital selling ivory openly and just three in Siem Reap, Nguyen found 10 in the summer of 2015 in Phnom Penh and five in Siem Reap. This was a huge drop from the 55 stores surveyed in the capital in 2002. “I was expecting to see more the first time,” she said. At the beginning of this year, she repeated the study and found that the local ivory market is changing drastically. “The second time I was surprised because it’s grown so quickly.”

In just under six months, the number of stores selling real ivory in Phnom Penh had jumped to 16 and to eight in Siem Reap. Most troubling to Nguyen, the number of items per store had increased, indicating that ivory was becoming more and more lucrative for store owners, who had beefed up their inventory. Of the stores, Nguyen estimates that more than half were Chinese owned, and even the local shops would have signs written in Chinese, suggesting they are targeting the nearly 700,000 Chinese tourists that visited Cambodia in 2015.

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