RAUB, Malaysia — Before he started a company 15 years ago selling the world’s smelliest fruit, Eric Chan had a well-paying job writing code for satellites and robots. His family and friends were puzzled when he made the career change.

The fruit, durian, has long been a cherished part of local cultures in Southeast Asia. A single durian is typically a little smaller than a football and can emit an odor so powerful that it is banned from most hotels. When Chan began his startup in his native Malaysia, durians were cheap and often sold from the back of trucks.

Then China acquired a taste for durian in a very big way.

Last year, the value of durian exports from Southeast Asia to China was $6.7 billion, a twelvefold increase from $550 million in 2017. China buys virtually all of the world’s exported durians, according to United Nations data. The biggest exporting country by far is Thailand. Malaysia and Vietnam are the other top sellers.

Today, businesses are expanding rapidly — one Thai company is planning an initial public offering this year — and some durian farmers have become millionaires. Chan is one of them. Seven years ago, he sold a controlling share of his company, which specializes in producing durian paste for cookies, ice cream and even pizza, for the equivalent of $4.5 million, nearly 50 times his initial investment.

“Everybody has been making good money,” Chan said of the once-poor durian farmers in Raub, a small city 90 minutes from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia’s capital. “They rebuilt their houses from wood to brick. And they can afford to send their children overseas for university.”

The surge in durian exports is a measure of the power of Chinese consumers in the global economy, even though, by other measures, the mainland economy is struggling. When an increasingly wealthy country of 1.4 billion people gets a taste for something, entire regions of Asia are reshaped to meet the demand.

In Vietnam, state news media reported last month that farmers were cutting down coffee plants to make room for durian. The acreage of durian orchards in Thailand has doubled over the past decade.

China is not only a buyer. Chinese investment has flowed into Thailand’s durian packing and logistics business. Already, Chinese interests control around 70% of the durian wholesale and logistics business, according to Aat Pisanwanich, a Thai expert in international trade. Thailand’s own wholesale durian companies could “disappear in the near future,” he said at a news conference in May.

Durian is to fruit what truffles are to mushrooms: Pound for pound, the fruit has become one of the most expensive. Depending on the variety, a single durian can sell for $10 to hundreds of dollars.

Eating an entire durian, which for most people is too rich and filling to do alone, is often a social event in Southeast Asia. The act of opening a durian, which requires a very sharp knife or machete, feels festive and brings friends together the way that sharing a fine wine does in other cultures.

But Chinese demand, which has pushed up prices fifteenfold over the past decade, has frustrated Southeast Asian consumers, who see durians morphing from a plentiful fruit seen in the wild and village orchards to a luxury commodity earmarked for export.