Dispatch from China: The time I got drunk off tiger wine (part 2 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

Read part 1 of this story here.

The automated gates chug and clatter open as a jeep, its windows ribbed with steel, noisily announces its arrival in the tiger park. Without the usual gaggle of tourists to impress, the occupants of a neighbouring jeep toss out a skinny pheasant as the driver shouts obscenities at a dozen lounging Siberian tigers.

One tiger finally takes notice and lunges at the fluttering fowl, which has enough brains to scuttle under one of the jeeps. The tiger, neither as sharp nor as small as the pheasant, slams into the vehicle with a thud. And as the hulking beast shakes off the dust and disappointment of his failed attempt, the pheasant dashes into the brush. The striped leviathan promptly settles back down, seemingly deciding that the prey isn’t worth the effort.

And why not, for these tigers are already well-fed, particularly by the 300,000 tourists who flock every year to the tiger park at the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Centre on the outskirts of Harbin in northeastern China’s Heilongjiang province.

But in the last year or so, the center has been subject to all sorts of media attention, from gruesome videos on the Internet of tigers eviscerating a bull as tourists gape, to reports of plans to reintroduce 600 of the cattle-fed, people-friendly tigers into the wild.

At a UN meeting last June in The Hague, the Netherlands, China’s tiger-breeding program was criticized for at best creating tourist traps, and at worst being flat-out farms for the animals. Indeed the Hengdaohezi facility was developed as a government-run enterprise to capitalize on the tiger-bone trade. Since the practice was outlawed in 1993, the park has depended on tourism for 80% of its $4 million per year operating costs. But shortly after the CITES meeting, Wang Wei, a deputy director at the State Forestry Administration in Beijing threatened the imminent reopening of the tiger trade, inviting 70 international tiger experts to Hengdaohezi that July to hear the merits of such a move.

So far, Western scientists are unconvinced that the proceeds from farming the animals might fund conservation efforts. Moreover they doubt whether conservation is something the facility is interested in or even equipped to do.

In a concrete bunker off-limits to gawking tourists, mother tigers nurse their cubs in tiny cages. The park’s chief scientist, Liu Dan, proudly surveys his charges. For him, the objective is straightforward. “Our goal is to reintroduce them into the wild,” he says. He denies media reports of an earlier failed reintroduction. The center did, however, send ten tigers to a small area resembling alpine forest in the Changbaishan reserve, close to the North Korean border. “It’s a very good wild habitat. A good exercise in all aspects of training, but still a big difference to the wild,” Liu Dan says to me.

The park contains roughly twice the number of Siberian tigers that exist in the wild, and letting loose even a few captives would have widespread conservation implications – especially in the small remaining natural range in northeastern China where perhaps ten tigers reside. But reintroduction wouldn’t be just about bolstering the wild population.

At Wolong Panda Reserve, keepers are increasing the population to maintain a healthy genetic reservoir in case of a sharp drop or extinction in the wild. Three hundred pandas is apparently the magic number, and tourists are no less impressed. There, as in Hengdaohezi, even keeping the animals caged can benefit conservation, as long as pedigrees are tracked and specific pairs matched to maximize diversity.

The tourists here love the liger enclosure – they can’t snap enough pictures as the tour bus slowly rolls past lions, tigers and their enormous hybrid offspring, all basking next to each other. The huge animals, a cross between a male lion and a female tiger, are a dramatic sight, but such disregard for intermixing could lead to bigger problems. The property also contains Bengal tigers, technically a different subspecies from their Siberian cohabitants, and the subspecies could produce harder-to-spot hybrids together.

In general, Hengdaohezi’s breeding strategy is crude compared with Western practices. Unlike US and European zoos that use computer models to calculate exactly which animals should mate together – and stud books to track every individual at Hengdaohezi, this tourist haven doesn’t control or record which tigers breed together

In captivity each female may mate with several male tigers when sexually receptive, confusing keepers on the paternity of the resulting cubs. The centre also rarely exchanges tigers with other breeding facilities. US zoos regularly shuttle tigers across the country to breed. The breeding facility is also not a member of the international stud book for Siberian tigers, which includes almost all US and European zoos.

For now, the Siberian tiger’s foothold seems sturdier than that of its cousin, the South China tiger. As a result of poor breeding and poaching, the South China population now numbers 66, all caged in a handful of zoos.

So the next time you’re happen to be in Harbin, should you drop by this place? After visiting, my take is an emphatic no! If you’re really curious, check out the Youtube videos of tigers at the park devouring a live bull in front of photo-snappy tourists. But that’s exactly the problem with this tiger farm. It’s a tourist trap, and an evil one at that.

Supporting this operation through tourism will encourage the tiger trade to reopen and possibly even harm the wild population. Basically you’ve just run over a cute little tiger kitten in a oil-spewing Hummer. You don’t want that to be you, right?

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Dispatch from China: The time I got drunk off tiger wine (part 1 of 2)

by Jerry Guo on

On a nondescript street near downtown Harbin, the Double Mountain Local Products Wholesale Center offers the usual array of kitsch items stripped from the wilderness: deer antlers, pelts and dried starfish. A request for tiger wine, a traditional brew of corpse-steeped cheap liquor with dozens of reputed medical benefits, raises a stern eyebrow from an employee who informs me that as such concoctions are illegal, they are not available at the store.

But at the mention of American money, a store manager intervenes – $100 would buy two bottles, and true to the employee’s words they are not at the store; they will be delivered via courier. Doubts about the brew’s authenticity are shooed away.

The manager is certain the bottles are the genuine article because, she says, “they came from over at that tiger park”. She is referring to the Hengdaohezi Feline Breeding Center on the outskirts of the city. By most accounts, that tiger farm is an enviable success. Started in 1986 with 8 Siberian tigers, it is now home to 800 of the big cats. Compare that with the estimated 150 Siberian tigers in US zoos. The largest tiger-breeding facility in the world, Hengdaohezi – like its cousin down south at the Wolong Panda Reserve – has learned the art of churning out cubs, 100 this year alone.
And whether or not she is speaking the truth, the manager is highlighting a looming international stand-off between conservationists and the Chinese government.

China banned domestic trade of tiger parts in 1993, but that did not arrest the desire for their use in wine or traditional Chinese medicine. A black market fills the demand and goods can often be traced back to breeding centres. In August 2006, a tiger farm in Guangxi province was caught with 400 vats of wine, each stewing a whole tiger carcass. This past June at the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) conference in The Hague, the Netherlands, wildlife officials used DNA evidence to accuse the same farm of serving tiger meat.

In a walk-in fridge at Hengdaohezi – off-limits to tourists and journalists – 200 frozen tiger carcasses lie scattered, waiting to be turned into tiger wine and medicine, according to a breeding consultant for the park at neighbouring Northeast Forestry University. Whether Hengdaohezi benefits tiger conservation is questionable, but one thing is certain – if the government lifts the ban on the tiger trade, places such as Hengdaohezi will profit.

Liu Dan, the park’s chief scientist, didn’t see a problem when I paid him a visit. “We can use dead tigers to save live tigers,” he explains, promising to use profits for the centre’s genetic and reintroduction projects.

With its baffling breeding techniques and plans to open a market in tiger parts, Hengdaohezi hardly seems the safest place for Siberian tigers, but how they would fare in the wild is even more uncertain. So perhaps it is fortunate that the reintroduction campaign is mainly hype for now. Although media reports mention plans to release 600 of the captive tigers (apparently hoping to coincide it with the Beijing Olympics), the center has not yet separated any group for eventual reintroduction, selected any potential release sites, or built specialist training enclosures.

As Liu Dan broods over his nursing mothers, he defends the conservation work of the center, posing the rhetorical question that if they weren’t keeping the tigers around for a greater purpose, wouldn’t they be just another tiger farm? “From breeding to reintroduction is a long process,” Liu Dan says. “The program isn’t mature yet.”

A decision on the tiger trade ban can come at any time, according to Chinese government officials. As of 2006, all tigers have been required to wear a microchip, and some authorities say such tracking abilities combined with a certification process – a system that met with success with China’s ivory, crocodile and ginseng trade – could lead to a win–win situation for everybody. But lifting the ban may be illegal. US wildlife enforcement officers say China would be flaunting an existing international ban on tiger parts – and noncompliance could lead to sanctions.

For now though, the world waits for China’s next move.

Stay tuned for tomorrow’s installment, in which I visit the evil breeding facility and play Dance Dance Revolution with a Siberian tiger.

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Do Good Travel: Bridges For Education is a way to head to China–or elsewhere

by Jamie Rhein on

If you’re looking for a cheap way to travel, and a cultural experience that will bring you past wandering in a country, hoping something significant in your life happens, here’s an organization that looks like a promising possibility.

I read about it in a travel blurb and then headed to the Web site to check it out. Bridges for Education is a short term program where participants teach conversational English in exchange for cheap room and board and a week of cultural tours at the end of the teaching obligation.

The premise of the organization is that, by using teaching English as a tool, tolerance and understanding between cultures is fostered. Originally set up to answer the need for English language acquisition programs in Eastern Europe, the reach has expanded to Zhangzhou, China.

One thing I like about Bridges for Education is that it’s a non-profit organization, non-religious, and it coordinates with other organizations like UNESCO. It also looks HIGHLY organized and well-thought out.

There is a balance between giving of your time and talents and being able to see the country where you’re doing your good works. Although, the trips aren’t free, the price seems doable–although you’ll have to hustle to find an inexpensive flight. The fees cover everything except travel insurance and the cost of airfare to get to the country. Once you’re in the country, you’re taken care of unless you go souvenir shopping. Admission to places during the week tour are also included. For more program info and locations, click here. If you find out it’s too late to sign up for this year, there’s always next summer.

Here’s a quote from the Bridges to Education Web site that captures the flavor of what the organization is about. “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” –Mark Twain

Dispatch from China: The time I befriended a fossil smuggler

by Jerry Guo on

The Imperial-styled strip mall may look like a relic of the past, with its clay tiles, ornate sidings and those Chinese New Year red lanterns, but like much in China, it’s spanking new. Yet relics of the past are good business here. In one of the mall’s countless stores, apron-clad Zhang Lijie is chipping away the rock around a 120 million-year-old fish fossil that she plans to sell for $3. Zhang, 38, went from selling vegetables a decade ago to hawking fossils on a street corners. Now, she owns her own store, The Treasure Mansion, which stocks the fossilized remains of ancient fish, trees, plants and insects – but no dinosaurs, which are officially illegal.

“Business is OK,” she says with a blush of modesty, after reluctantly admitting she earns 10 times what she did as a farmer, and now lives comfortably in an airy loft above the shop.
Here in Chaoyang, an impoverished northeastern Chinese city surrounded by cornfields where farmers still use horse-drawn plows, prehistoric bones have jump-started the economy in a way no free-trade zone or joint venture could have done. The region shot to fame in the mid-1990s when paleontologists began discovering feathered dinosaurs and other well-preserved fossils. They eventually logged at least 500 new species in the area. Good news for scientists, but even better news for an entire generation of farmers, dealers, shop owners, and even local officials who profit from a flourishing underground trade in priceless fossils.

Most fossils find their way to Ancient Street, the pedestrian boulevard that, despite its name, opened only last year, boasting over 60 stores that make it by far the biggest commercial fossil market in the world. There’s a noticeable hierarchy here, with the newly minted dealers competing with each other, as well as peddlers of gaudy flowers and pirated books, out on the street. More established dealers set up booths in a crowded three-story building. Only the shrewdest, like Zhang, can afford the stand-alone storefronts.

Trade can be slow, and a gaggle of bored shopkeepers sit around a table sipping tea as a couple of college-aged students browse for gifts for their professors. Most customers buy fossils for others, as gifts or bribes. After an initial rush, shopkeepers say, demand has leveled out, although their stores remain open. “It’s normal to go a month or two without a sale, because there are so many other shops,” says one dealer. But she didn’t seem worried, explaining that selling just the occasional $300 petrified tree stump or $600 marine lizard will keep her business afloat.

Ancient Street is for the casual fossil buyer, of course; Chinese moguls and Western collectors head instead for dealers like Wang Facai (literally meaning “fortune”), whose store called Rare Stones, carries no precious jewels, just some dusty Ming vases (likely fakes) and cheap fish fossils scattered on the shelves. The bulky Wang, in a muscle T-shirt, glances around before beckoning me into one of two back rooms. From a secret closet behind a mirror, he pulls out a slab of rock which contains the profile of a half bird, half dinosaur, Confuciusornis sanctus, whose discovery in 1994 helped scientists develop the theory that birds evolved from dinosaurs.

“Everyone wants this bird,” he says, trying to convince me the $8,500 sticker price is a steal. Wang also shows me pictures of a $1,500 dog-sized dino (uncanny resemblance to the pet dino in The Flintsones) and a $25,000 unidentified feathered dinosaur.

Although sales of dinosaurs are strictly illegal, local officials tend to look the other way. “The middlemen and authorities are in bed together,” says a retired reporter for the Chaoyang Daily, who has investigated the local fossil trade for the past decade. “The officials receive money, and even fossils, so they ignore the situation.”

As fossil collecting becomes the next big thing for China’s nouveaux riches and even Hollywood leading men – Leonardo DiCaprio and Nicolas Cage reportedly recently got into a bidding war over the remains of a $276,000 Asian T-rex – the paleontological paradise of Chaoyang is under threat. Farmers and dealers are hard at work disturbing potentially valuable sites in the race to find specimens to sell. In a cornfield outside of town, farmers have sliced open an entire hill. Layers of earth, each covering deposits millions of years old, protrude naked, leaving only broken slabs of rock. Along the road back into town, farmers ride bicycles with shovels lashed to their backs, returning home after a hard day’s treasure-hunting.

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Photo of the Day (5/11/08)

by Jeremy Kressmann on

I’m a sucker for a good sunset. Aside from being beautiful, the lighting conditions are also perfect for some great photography. Flickr user matt.hintsa has the right idea in today’s photo. Matt’s shot of Shanghai captures a little bit of everything. The silhouettes of the two ancient Chinese buildings do a great job of framing the ultra-modern skyscraper in the background. And the top of the skyscraper is bathed in that beautiful light you can only get at the very end or beginning of the day, when the sun sits low on the horizon. Nice work.

Think you’ve got a great shot of a Shanghai sunset? Or maybe just one from Springfield, Illinois? Add it to the Gadling photo pool on Flickr and we just might feature it as our Photo of the Day.