South China Tiger

The South China Tiger is the world’s most endangered tiger. It has been listed on the IUCN Red List as Critically Endangered since 1996. As its name suggests, it was formerly found in southern China where it suffered dramatic losses across the past century due to government “pest” eradication efforts, habitat loss and hunting.

After over three decades of extensive surveys seeking any signs of remaining tigers with no success, it is sadly presumed to be *extinct* in the wild.

The South China Tiger is the most recent tiger subspecies to go extinct in the wild since the Javan tiger disappeared in the 1970s. Today, this tiger subspecies survives only in captivity, mostly in Chinese Zoos.

The South China Tiger is the most ancient of the tiger subspecies, believed to be a relic of the “stem tiger” from which all other tiger subspecies are descended. All 37 living cat species trace back to a panther-like predator that lived in Southeast Asia 11 million years ago. Big cats diverged from this ancestor, splitting the Panthera genus into two groups: the clouded leopards, and the ‘great roaring cats’ including the lion, jaguar, snow leopard, leopard and tiger.

The earliest tiger fossils found in northern China and Java date to around 2 million years old.

In China, the South China Tiger coexisted with humans for more than five centuries as the “The King of the Hundred Beasts”. It held deep political, cultural, artistic, and even cosmological meaning throughout Chinese history, inspiring countless poems, paintings, and stories and is one of the twelve animals of the Chinese Zodiac. According to Chinese myths, five types of tigers balance the energy of the universe, holding us back from tipping into chaos.

A tiger claw amulet is believed to protect the wearer from sudden fright and to impart courage, while babies wear colorfully embroidered tiger shoes to keep them safe. Tiger images adorn the walls of homes and temples to ward off evil spirits, with a white tiger guarding the dead.

China differs from every other tiger range country as the only country to have had four subspecies of tigers within its borders: the now extinct Caspian tiger, the endangered Amur tiger, the endangered Indochinese tiger and the South China Tiger. As such, the South China Tiger is a very special tiger for China not only culturally, but as China’s only endemic tiger species.

The South China tiger’s historical range stretched an expansive 1200 miles east to west, and almost 1000 miles north to south in southern China. Some would occasionally cross the border to more densely populated Hong Kong to hunt wild boar and domestic cattle, occasionally attacking humans before slipping back over the hills. In 1916, the roar of a tiger terrified commuters on Hong Kong’s famous Peak Tram.

With a long history of coexistence in China, the South China tiger maintained a healthy population estimated at 4000 individuals up until the 1950s. It was an explosion in human population combined with Chairman Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward, that sounded the final death knell for the South China tigers. Under Mao’s large-scale “anti-pest” campaign, tigers were hunted down and all but extirpated.

Wildlife and other natural resources became commodities to be fully exploited to serve the economic needs of the State, resulting in deforestation of tiger habitat for human settlements and agriculture. Large numbers of people were repopulated from urban centers to rural locations which further fragmented the tiger’s remaining habitat and increased its vulnerability to conflict with humans, while depleting its prey base.

China banned the hunting of tigers in 1979, giving them full protection under the law, and established several tiger reserves, but it was already too late. By 1996 only 30 to 80 individuals were thought to remain in the wild. An intensive survey conducted between 2000-2001 using hundreds of camera traps in the eight most promising former tiger range reserves found no trace of the South China tigers.

At last count in November 2018 the captive population numbered 178 tigers (88 female, 89 male) distributed across 15 zoos in China and 1 private reserve in South Africa. These tigers are the genetic reservoir for their subspecies and all that now stands between the South China tiger and extinction.