Travelers making no stink over durian

Pattanan Jamphot, 58, who owns a 64,000-square-meter durian farm with 700 trees producing the fruit in the eastern Thai province of Chanthaburi, said almost all the output from her plantation is exported to China.

After being harvested, Pattanan's durians are packed into boxes marked with Chinese characters at a roadside logistics facility. They are then shipped in containers on large trailers to Chinese consumers directly, a journey that takes just four to five days, Pattanan said.

Durians are increasingly being shipped overland instead of by sea due to falling costs, thanks to improvements to cross-border roads in Southeast Asia, said Adisorn Chanprapalert, minister-counselor at the office of agricultural affairs at the Thai embassy in Beijing.

The 114-kilometer Hongsa-Chiang Man Road, built in 2016, has cut the journey time between China and Thailand. The road, which runs through Laos, has halved the previous journey time by sea.

Just three years ago, selling durian could be a risky business, as transporting the fruit to China was time consuming.

Su Jiangshan, a Beijinger who owns an online fruit shop, said he lost almost 20,000 yuan in 2015 from durian sales.

Durian ripen in Thailand between May and September. But for both China and Thailand, the summer heat increases transportation risks for the fruit.

"It takes at least two weeks for my customers to receive their orders," Su said, adding that it usually takes four to five days for his orders to reach the Laotian border with China and another four to five days to transport the fruit to Beijing by train or truck.

"Even though I used the Shun Feng cold chain express service to transport the durian to my customers, they requested refunds of more than 40 percent, as the fruit they received had already rotted," Su said.

The improvements in cross-border transportation networks in recent years and the rise of internet commerce can directly connect durian farmers with consumers.