Tucked into a grimy building in Guangzhou, a few Chinese master carvers chip away at ivory tusks with chisels, fashioning them into the sorts of intricate carvings of the type once prized by Chinese emperors.

A passion for ivory ornaments like these helped decimate African and Asian elephant populations before a 1989 ban on ivory trade. Now, the economic rise of China, along with a seemingly insatiable appetite for status symbols among the country’s nouveaux riches, has renewed demand for African ivory.

In remote pockets of Africa, like the Tsavo East region in Kenya, where giraffes wander across pavement freshly laid by Chinese laborers, and in teeming market towns on the banks of the Nile in Sudan, where Chinese merchants barter and buy ivory openly, the Chinese imprint is conspicuous and growing.

‘‘The Chinese are all over Africa and are buying up ivory, worked and raw,’’ said Esmond Martin, a conservationist who has closely tracked the involvement of Chinese buyers in the black market ivory trade.

‘‘The last time I was up in Khartoum or Omdurman I found that about 75 percent of all the ivory being sold was bought by Chinese,’’ he said, referring to two cities in Sudan.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species, the global wildlife trade monitor also known as Cites, said in a 2007 report that China faced a ‘‘major challenge’’ in continuing to be the ‘‘most important country globally as a destination for illicit ivory,’’ a problem exacerbated in part by China’s spreading influence and ties in Africa.

Chinese nationals have been arrested and convicted of ivory smuggling in Africa and organized crime gangs are involved in importing large quantities of illicit ivory into China, according to the Environmental Investigation Agency, an independent group based in London.

In a bid to stem illegal poaching, Cites, which is backed by the United Nations, allowed a 62-ton batch of elephant tusks to be imported legally into China last year. The ivory stockpiles were bought by Chinese traders at auctions.

At the time, Allan Thornton, head of the Environmental Investigation Agency, expressed concern that the sale would fuel the appetite for ivory in China. ‘‘In a country of 1.3 billion people, demand for ivory from just a fraction of 1 percent of the population is colossal,’’ he told the British newspaper The Telegraph.

Ivory trading was banned in 1989 after decades of poaching halved the African elephant population. About 600,000 elephants remained there by 1997, according to conservation groups.

The Cites secretariat in Geneva noted a trend in which longtime Chinese expatriates in Africa get heavily involved in the trade. A number of lower-level ivory couriers arrested recently have been residents of mainland China.

While most countries enforce the ban on ivory, in recent years China and Japan have been permitted to buy nonpoached ivory from several African countries in an effort to raise money for wildlife conservation and to smother demand for poached ivory with a steady flow of cheaper tusks.

‘‘If the demand is supplied by legalorigin ivory, then that should begin to close the doors for the criminals,’’ said John Sellar, a senior enforcement officer for Cites in Geneva.

He said the two-decade-long ivory ban had helped stabilize overall elephant numbers, with only scattered local populations under serious threat from poachers in countries like Chad and Congo.

In Botswana alone, he said, there are more than 130,000 wild elephants.

‘‘The elephant as a species is no way in danger,’’ he added.

In China, officials who regulate the domestic ivory trade said there had not been a conspicuous increase in ivory consumption, given tight laws and controls that restrict ivory sales and manufacturing to about 130 addresses nationwide.

Yet this year, 37 more stores were approved as official ivory retail outlets.

There have also been telling signs on the ground.

In Guangzhou’s antiques market, numerous stalls openly sell uncertified ivory from trinkets to large carved tusks.

‘‘I can get you as much as you like,’’ said one dealer, who gave her surname as Wu.

She was asking 8,000 yuan, or $1,170, for a small carved ivory Buddha’s head and a similar price for an elaborate fan.

‘‘Come back later this afternoon.’’ At another stall, a small painted tusk was displayed in a bustling alley.

Guangzhou has close economic ties with Africa and tens of thousands of African traders live in the city, said Wan Ziming, the director of law enforcement and training at the Cites management authority of China. ‘‘So we cannot discount the possibility they are bringing ivory in.’’ ‘‘Guangzhou has become a hub for the smuggling of ivory,’’ added the director, whose department is under the Chinese government’s State Forestry Administration.

Cites rejects claims by animal rights groups that controlled ivory sales worsen the illegal trade.

It says poaching levels are more closely linked to governance problems and political instability in African regions.

But Xu Hongfa, the China director of Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network, said that enforcement needed to be improved across China and that there was evidence that contraband ivory was seeping across China to areas like Tibet.

A Traffic researcher conducting field investigations in China, who requested anonymity because of the sensitive nature of her work, said contraband ivory at least a third cheaper than ivory in official stores.

Meanwhile, after having been starved of fresh African ivory for years and scraping by on rare and pricey excavated mammoth tusks, Chinese carvers hope the recent availability of ivory will keep their ancient craft alive.

‘‘This will help us survive,’’ said 77- year-old Li Dingning, who has watched Guangzhou’s once booming ivory industry drop to about 100 master carvers including himself. ‘‘Only if you have the raw materials to work with, will people learn. If not, then everyone will find other jobs.’’ Carvers are banking on the hope of purchases by more of the increasingly affluent masses in China.

Their wares, which are seen as status symbols can cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

‘‘Before the 1990s you couldn’t buy ivory within China. We used to only export our carvings,’’ Mr. Li said, as he stood before a monumental ivory boat carved from a single massive tusk, with thousands of miniature figurines milling about multiple decks.

‘‘But now it can be freely circulated, so there are more people than ever who want to buy ivory carvings and products.’’ TomKirkwood reported from Nairobi.