Legend has it that on a Tuesday morning in September 2010, a drunk Chinese fisherman changed the course of commodities history.
His trawler, the Minjinyu 5179, was floating off the coast of the Senkaku Islands, a group of uninhabited rocks in the disputed waters between Taiwan, China and Japan. It was one of several Chinese boats playing a game of geopolitical chicken: fishing in the rich but off-limits waters around the islands, before being chased away by the Japanese coastguard.