After cutting a palm leaf into three pieces and knotting them together, Hu Licheng quickly weaved the stomach of a cricket. "Hold this for me," he said as he handed the partly-finished handicraft to a boy near the gate of Jing'an Park in Shanghai. He then made the cricket's head and wings.

It was a Saturday afternoon and the 61-year-old was surrounded by children waiting to get one of his weaved creatures, which range from grasshoppers and dragonflies to lizards and roosters.

Girls like butterflies and boys prefer the mantis, he said, adding that foreigners usually buy a frog or cricket, suggesting perhaps that it was because they best resemble the real thing.