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John Saeki, The Last Tigers of Hong Kong: True Stories of Big Cats that Stalked Britain’s Chinese Colony (with pen-and-ink illustrations by Gary Yeung), Blacksmith Books, 2022. 212 pgs.

Tigers once roamed Hong Kong. They frequently crossed the border from southern China, their original home, and into the walled villages of the New Territories. Occasionally swimming across the harbour, traversing The Peak to the island’s southernmost tip in Stanley, and onward to outlying islands, their visits are now remembered by only a few of a fading generation.

What does looking at how people interacted with the wild animals in their midst tell us about past societies? This is the question that slinks, softly padding in the brush in John Saeki’s The Last Tigers of Hong Kong, keeping the reader alert, and their wits about.

This is not a story of poaching as it would be of the Masai Mara or Serengeti and the unresolved dialectic of nature conservation’s encroachment upon traditional agricultural livelihoods for the curtailment of the illegal goods and game trade. Nor is it a tale of the consumption of dog meat in South Korea or Vietnam, another oft-written curiosity of the persistence of unusual yet undesirable cultural practices despite civilisational progress. Nor is this the story of the depletion of the South China tiger population in the derelict pursuit of rare and miracle-cure medicinal ingredients. All tropes of non-white barbarism capable of valuing neither biodiversity nor the companionship of animals.

Instead, Saeki asks, what do colonial-era print media records of tiger sightings in Hong Kong tell us about British views of and sentiment toward the people of “the pearl of the Orient”? The answer he tells us is very much connected to the pedestal on which they placed India—the imperial “jewel in the crown”—and its “exotic” wildlife.

There was a sense that the grandeur of the tiger didn’t belong to this scratty place that was not much more than a trading post and garrison town in many people’s minds – hardly the jewel in the crown that was India.

Tigers are the magnificent animals that belong to the mysterious wonderland of the Indian rainforest. There, brave, mostly aristocratic hunters of renown would shoot the beasts from the backs of elephants after they were flushed out of the forest by an army of Indian jungle beaters. Tigers come at the level of power and drama, not skulking around in the deforested wastelands of Hong Kong’s back country, tearing off the odd limb from a buffalo or a pig.

Perched atop one such pachyderm as a child, my father-in-law recalled the practice, but not before quipping, “were they hiding behind the bushes in Hong Kong?” His father and grandfather before him had both served in the Indian Imperial Police and imbibed the love of shikar. A tiger pelt adorns the family’s formal sitting-cum-dining room, reserved for entertaining guests, prompting such retellings.

For the British, tigers—real tigers—were only to be found in the subcontinent they had conquered to govern, extract, and to know, from its vast agricultural plains to the palatial courts of its previous rulers, to its multitudes of linguistic religio-cultural groups. The geopolitical force-feeding of opium through Hong Kong for a quick fix to an unhealthy balance of payments from buying too much tea—the most insatiable of bland British excesses—excised a comparatively uninterested mode of governance. They were not there to know, and if they weren’t there to know, there was little worth knowing to begin with.

English language reports of tiger sightings in Hong Kong commence with the 1898 seizing of the New Territories. Chronicling 60 tiger appearances from hundreds of newsprint clippings across the first three quarters of the 20th century, Saeki notes an unmistakable tone of derision among English-language correspondents questioning the veracity of local sightings and—often bloody—encounters. Stories of inexplicable livestock slaughter, muddy paw prints of a size unknown in local wildlife, carcasses, glimpses of black and orange stripes and glowing eyes on nightly vigils, all went unheeded “[cast with] an arched eyebrow” (75).

Dismissed as the words of fearful and excitable country bumpkins who couldn’t tell a civet from an elephant, reports of tiger sightings were repeatedly punctuated with scare quotes. Commenting on his own profession, Saeki characterises journalists as a guild who “hate to be thought gullible, so it is sometimes easier for a correspondent to treat a story with scepticism than to investigate the murky facts”. Thus, despite the failure of a hunting party to bag a Castle Peak cat in 1907, a grass-cutter who spots the stripes is said to have “fled with lusty screams of flight” (37-38). In contrast, Saeki notes that sightings by members of the colonial administration and police, and British residents on hiking expeditions were written in a balanced manner and not as “a concoction of the ludicrous ‘native mind’” (72), though eventually journalistic interest in the topic would wane.

Reading around the editorialised cynicism, Saeki takes at their word the stories of ordinary New Territories dwellers, Kowloon migrant traders, labourers and Gurkhas, and the houseboys and the nannies of The Peak—valuing them as empirical accounts. He recounts their everyday tactics for living with and protecting their livestock, loved ones, and those under their bearing from the predatory beasts. They banged pots, pans, and gongs for noise-making to scare off a prowler. They learned the crawler is rather clumsy at scampering downhill—knowledge won by the skin of their teeth.Armed with hand-made weapons such as spears and arrows, they embarked upon nightly stake outs, laid traps, and gave chase, anxious to put an end to the deadly stalkings.

Saeki uncovers peculiar legal evidence of the presence of tigers in the New Territories in the 1920s. One witness’s account of an alleged murder is dismissed when she cannot confirm that her daughter-in-law poisoned her son’s lunch. The mother did not return to their home that afternoon to witness the meal being cooked because she was protecting her livestock from a creeping tiger known to hunt at midday. Yet, disbelief besets all but two accounts, the Sheung Shui tiger of 1915, whose skin can be found in City Hall, and the Stanley tiger of 1942, the pelt of which is conserved in the village’s Tin Hau temple.

Tigers entered Hong Kong by way of Guangdong province, paying no mind to newly drawn territorial lines. For them the borders were porous, Saeki reminds us, and the walled villages of the New Territories were easily surmountable to make off with a buffalo, guard dog, or an unattended child, and in one case a load of toads (119). Citing academic geographer Christoper Coggins’s work on tiger conservation across southern China, he informs readers of meticulously recorded tiger maulings dating back centuries in pre-colonial gazetteers, among other notations of human-fauna interactions. He also describes the way local communities historically explained living syncretically with tigers. Venerating and cowering before“The Lord of the Hundred Beasts”, periods of peaceful and disruptive human-tiger relations became parables for good and bad governance (52-59).

Recreational British-led hunting parties of “gun enthusiasts and have-a-go heroes” (28) travelled southward for sport where the tiger was known and accepted to exist.These are expeditions of bravery, blunder, and cruelty, “where breathtaking daring and ingenuity often travel side-by-side with unfathomably bad decision-making,” writes Saeki. Despite the proximity to the province next door, tiger sightings south of the border are dismissed, as if the great cats could be corralled by colonial cartographies.  

When this region’s history-makers were not conquering and dividing, they were conflating: man versus nature, man versus man, man versus himself. The precipitate of the tigris amoyensis’seventual culling under Mao’s “Kill the Tiger” campaigns arrived decades earlier in the form of Harry Caldwell, locked and loaded with the primal desire to convert (with the barrel of his) the Savage(s). Recounting the exploits of the American Christian missionary, Saeki also asks “how much the well-meaning God-fearing hunter-missionary” who felled 48 tigers before the end of the Japanese occupation, “helped to bring about the demise of the species” (131-32).

According to Caldwell, fear of tigers was preventing forest dwellers from attending his sermons and they were missing out on the message from their one true saviour. He set out to do away with the one obstacle that lay between him, the Chinese, and Jesus. Among other methods, Caldwell “placed [goat] kids in a basket and hid them in a bush, bleating and pleading” (116) to bait the tigers. When they emerged from their lairs, he shot them dead, saving the ignorant and superstitious natives from man-eaters and false gods.

Wild cat tropes abound in Saeki’s writing, revealing his own reverence for the majestic creature that ruled with equal parts ferocity and cunning, while capturing the terror of humans who lived in their midst. His use of language is a delight: “[tigers] would flash through the undergrowth, stride across hillsides, and trample over farmland” (15). We also gain from Saeki an overview of tiger behaviour in a changing habitat and ecology that increasingly included humans, and in which they adapted to wide and rapid historic transformation.

There was much to-and-fro across the border: first flight from Japanese occupation, and later under more war and communism. The fear and economic strife that characterised the great leap forward on one side resulted in an enormous influx of people on the other. “The South China tiger would have looked on in dismay as tens of thousands of fretful and hungry humans set up messy squatter camps on once-quiet hillsides and valleys, lighting fires and stripping woodland of anything left that was useful or edible” (154). Death and violence were also not uncommon in the formation of the colony. There was crime, there was epidemic disease, there were labour strikes, and there were riots and uprisings. Life squeezed out in the grips of a tiger’s jugular was but one of many ways to go. Migration and settlement across the second half of the 1940s saw a decline in the deer population, deforestation, and industrial and urban sprawl. These ecological changes were interspersed with the most reported tiger sightings of the century.

Meanwhile in the land of their origin, tigers would unwittingly outsmart themselves, becoming “too bold, too visible, too deadly … [and the] new leaders of a modern weaponised world would soon decide that living with the predator was no longer an acceptable risk” (131).Forestlands were to be made agriculturally productive to feed soldiers fighting in North Korea and destroying a food chain would not be remiss. First felled were the feral boars and cows that only briefly enjoyed the updated culinary offering from newly sown crops where they had erstwhile grazed. With their usual food source depleted it was observed that “when a tiger cannot find a nice little muntjac, porcupine or pangolin to eat, it turns on anything convenient” for an equally tasty edible. With the buffer removed by humans and the gateway to economic advancement opened, this was unconscionable—the tigers had to go—nothing was to stand in the way of agricultural productivity.

The establishment of the People’s Republic of China brought with it the deployment of hundreds of hunting parties across the region, led by ordinary citizens ordered to cull the beasts. The move was spearheaded by the military and not agricultural experts, Saeki points out, and reduced the tiger population from 4,000 to a quarter of that figure in a single decade. The skins and parts were then sold for additional economic gain and by 1965 next to no tigers were left; their visits to Hong Kong ceased as well. The last official Hong Kong sighting was the Shing Mun Rambler that same year, while a few suspected but unverified sightings persisted until 1976 (192). Musing on the machinations of modernity and its inability to preserve the past by predicting the future, Saeki writes:

It might be tempting to look back and imagine some visionary taking grip of the situation in China in the 1950s, setting up sanctuaries and preserving the fantastic beasts in pristine, protected forests. All the while peasant farmers could have tapped into their ancestral memories to remember how to live in peace with the awesome mammals, reaching back through millennia of folklore and wisdom.

But that is not what happened, and let’s not forget that many of the problem beasts were not really living in the wilderness. They were scavenging on the edge of human settlements, eating dogs and pigs, their owners, and their owners’ children.

Considering all that, it is correct to say something needed to be done… (184-185)

Today the South China tiger is rebred from captivity, relying on a gene pool from 57 rescues found in the early 2000s. Of this tragic irony, hewrites:

We took over the apex and took revenge. That in itself was not enough; we pushed our nemesis to the brink. Then we blinked and realised we had gone too far. Now we are trying desperately to save our old foes and bring them back from the edge of oblivion. (43-44)

There are a plethora of books available to a general English language readership in Hong Kong hoping to understand more about the place they are from, living in temporarily, or briefly visiting. Written by both Hongkongers and expatriates, some are a sepia-hued nostalgic recollection of its colonial emergence, while others cover the turmoil of its recent political upheaval—both an ode to the city’s disappearing existence. As Hong Kong’s cultural and geographical borders shift once again, Saeki asks us to remember the tigers of its tenuous hold on history, no more the intermittent interlopers.

How to cite: Shah, Radha. “The Forgotten Hunters: John Saeki’s Last Tigers of Hong Kong.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 5 Jun. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/06/05/last-tigers.

Radha Shah is a nonprofit professional and university instructor with a background in social anthropology and postcolonial studies. Currently based in Hong Kong, she works on reproductive healthcare protections for migrant domestic workers. Previously, she was based in Islamabad and worked on a range of equity and inclusion areas in the development sector, including prison reform. She is author of Serving Time: Pakistan’s Prisons Through The Ages. Her interest in human animal studies is often inspired by her stray street mutt, Ella.

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