Decades ago, he stole a tree branch. Now he is the Durian King

Long before he was the Durian King, Tan Eow Chong was canvassing rural Malaysia for plants he could farm when he stumbled on a roadside stand selling a curiously golden-fleshed variety of the fruit.

The seller, an elderly woman, urged Tan to have a taste, boasting that her durians were the same color as the local sultan’s palace.

Tan took one bite and was transfixed. Apart from the notorious aroma, which is often compared to rotting meat, it was nothing like the fibrous durians with large pits that he grew at home 200 miles away on Penang Island. This one was meatier, creamier and bittersweet — everything a durian connoisseur would want.

“The flesh melted in my mouth,” said Tan, who decided then that he had to grow the durian himself.

The fruit came from a nearby orchard. Tan asked whether he could have a branch to graft onto one of his trees, but the woman shooed away the idea. So that evening he returned with a villager armed with a rifle. At Tan’s instructions, and for pay, the man pruned a footlong branch with a well-placed shot.

Thirty-five years after his heist, Tan is reaping the rewards.

The tree limb provided the genetics for an award-winning durian known as the Musang King, which has become Malaysia’s next cash crop and made Tan’s family durian royalty.

His success, however, came only recently — thanks to his perseverance through hard economic times and a magnate who happened to spark a Musang King obsession in China, a country whose 1.4 billion stomachs have the power to move markets.

The durian is no ordinary fruit. Its thorny cantaloupe-sized husk looks like a hedgehog crossed with an avocado. Locked inside are lobes of fruit that have the look and texture of foie gras and are usually eaten raw, but can also be mixed with rice or added to pastries.

What defines durian fruit, however, is its overpowering sulfuric scent, which has led to bans from public transportation and the occasional evacuation of buildings. The odor is strong enough to penetrate the fruit’s thick shell. When the shell is cracked open, the scent can buckle a neophyte’s knees. But for the fruit’s admirers, the stench is part of the allure.

“If it doesn’t stink, it’s not durian,” Tan said.

The world’s biggest emerging consumer market appears firmly in favor of the smell. China’s massive unmet demand for durian is the prime reason the Hong Kong consulting firm Plantations International predicts that the global market for raw durian will reach $25 billion by 2030 — up from $15 billion in 2016.

A growing share of that is expected to come from Malaysia, where the fruit is thought to have originated and the average person eats 24 pounds of it each year — far more than anywhere else in world.

Tan, 58, has seen his revenue grow tenfold in the six years since he began exporting durians to China.

Now, among locals on this lush island west of the Malay peninsula, Tan is the Durian King.

The story of how Tan earned his crown begins with his father, a pig farmer from China’s coastal Fujian province. Before migrating to Malaysia in the 1940s, the elder Tan had never seen a durian.

He noticed the fruit growing wild on his property in Balik Pulau, a bucolic corner of Penang, and decided to farm it.

Back then, there was mostly one variety of durian, the Kampung, the Malay word for village. Though still sought after, it is unremarkable compared with today’s hybrid varieties.

Tan learned to farm as a boy in the early 1970s alongside his father. But he didn’t particularly like it and as a young man became a self-described gangster — a dai goh, or big brother in Cantonese parlance — overseeing a band of hoodlums.

By his early 20s, though, he began taking farming seriously after his father explained how he planned to bequeath his farmland one day. Tan’s two brothers would split the family’s coffee plantings and hog farm.

Tan would inherit the durian plantation, a nod to his passion for the Frankenstein science of grafting. The skill allowed him to improve on the Kampung by cross-breeding it with richer and meatier durians he’d occasionally find.

It was the technique he used when he brought back his prized limb from behind the roadside stand in the northeastern state of Kelantan and joined it to a mature tree.

It took Tan three years for the grafting to bear fruit and two more years of plantings to come up with a durian he was willing to sell.

He called it Rajah Kunyit, Malay for Turmeric King, on account of the meat’s bright yellow hue. Growers on the Malaysian mainland developed an identical hybrid, but called it the Musang King, which means Mountain Cat King. The latter name stuck.

The new variety brought Tan a modicum of fame, but at only $1 for about 2 pounds, no fortune.