China’s surging economy has produced an appetite for high quality furniture, for the nouveau riche who can afford it.  And that demand is causing the near extinction of a rare tropical tree as well as a deadly crime wave that’s sweeping across Southeast Asia.

The Siamese Rosewood used to be found in the Mekong Delta in Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.  But there are fewer than 100,000 trees left in Thailand, and few left in the other countries.  The London-based Environmental Investigation Agency says that they’re disappearing to become furniture for China, where the deep red wood called Lao Hongmu is especially prized.  China imported more than 1.75 Million cubic meters of Hongmu timber from the Mekong region.

There’s a heavy demand, but a dwindling supply.  Despite laws to protect the endangered trees, criminal gangs have sprung up to poach them – and they don’t allow law enforcers to stand in their way.

“The tools of the trade are chainsaws, guns and even rocket-propelled grenade launchers,” said the report from the Environmental Investigation Agency.   “Since 2009, dozens of forest rangers have been killed” in Thailand in shootouts with tree poachers from Cambodia.  Blood has been spilled on both sides, as 45-Cambodian loggers were “reportedly shot dead by Thai forces in 2012 alone”.

There’s profit to be made up and down the chain.  Bribery ensures the poached logs make it across national borders for processing.  And if that’s not an option, there’s always working within the law.

Last year’s Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species treaty bans endangered timber exports from signatory nations.  But the ban only covers raw logs and planks of lumber.

“The traders now can crudely process the timber in the source country and then export it as ‘furniture’, circumventing the ban,” said Yu Hongyan, a collector of rosewood furniture and timber living in Beijing, who notes that in the past 30 years China has gone through twice as much Siamese Rosewood than it did during the 500 years of the Ming and Qing Dynasties.

“Unfortunately, China’s history of furniture-making is essentially a history of forest depletion,” Yu lamented.