ON THE morning of Thursday, December 18, last year, a group of Agriculture and Fisheries Department officers paid a visit to the Furama Hotel. A private sale was due to take place; faxes had been sent out inviting potential customers to 'indulge and pamper yourself' with shahtoosh shawls. The staff from the AFD, however, had not gone to purchase Christmas treats. Within minutes, they had seized 130 shawls on display and within the next 24 hours, they had raided four shops and seized a further 46 shawls.
That Friday, while the AFD were still conducting these raids, a South China Morning Post gossip columnist blithely reported: 'With the cold spell coming on, shahtoosh fever has hit the tai-tai set ... Considered more precious than sable, some tai-tais are known to have a collection of at least 30 or 40 in different colours. Lydia Kan, a devotee, has even arranged a trip with some of her friends - Janet Cheng and Stella Lu among them - to fly to New Delhi for a shahtoosh shopping trip.' In her office in Stanley Street, Judy Mills, director of Traffic East Asia, which monitors wildlife trade under the auspices of the World Wide Fund For Nature and the World Conservation Union, couldn't believe her eyes. 'We were sending out press releases about the Furama raid and at the same time people were sending in faxes of this story about tai-tais going on shopping trips to buy shahtoosh.' She pauses, frustrated and angry at the farcical situation.
'There are people in this town who know full well that animals are being killed to make shahtoosh, and they're trading and buying anyway, and that's what I think is unconscionable. I believe that buying a shahtoosh shawl is not dissimilar to buying a tigerskin coat. We're not talking animal welfare, we're talking conservation and a fear of extinction.' The story of shahtoosh is one of ignorance, muddled facts, greed, cruelty and the most exquisite, soft wool on the face of the planet. It is said of shahtoosh that it is so fine that you can pull it through a ring (hence the term 'ring shawls') and so warm that a pigeon's egg, wrapped in its gossamer folds, will hatch. Or be cooked - the story varies, rather like the provenance of the wool itself. For years, it was believed the wool came from the Himalayan ibex goat and was gathered, in some charming bucolic ritual, from the bushes and rocks where the animals rubbed themselves while moulting.
This version is the popular one: no beast is injured and the rarity of the shawl is enhanced by the thought of all those valuable wisps being collected from picturesque crags. As a result, prices start at about $8,000 which itself may be part of the attraction. During an interview in this magazine in 1995, Joyce Ma was photographed wearing two shahtoosh shawls which, she patiently explained, came from the neck of the Himalayan ibex goat. The more canny traders in India occasionally stick photographs of the Himalayan ibex goat in their shop windows to reassure buyers who may have mild, though perhaps intellectually woolly, unease about the source of shahtoosh.
What happens in real life only became hideously apparent at the end of the 1980s. There is an animal called the chiru antelope which lives, primarily, on the massive Tibetan plateau, an area so bleak and windswept that there are no convenient bushes upon which it can hang its fine hairs. So it is killed. Poachers come in, ride alongside the herds in jeeps, shoot the antelopes (as many as 500 in one hunt), skin them and sell the wool to traders who then bring it across the border to India where it is woven into shawls.
If that isn't already bad enough, the favoured form of trade, at this stage, is barter: in exchange for shahtoosh wool, the middlemen supply tiger bones and tiger skins. Last November, the Wildlife Protection Society of India (WPSI) issued a report about the shahtoosh trade called Fashioned For Extinction in which the authors, Belinda Wright and Ashok Kumar, said that they 'have no doubt whatsoever that it will be impossible to control the tiger bone trade if the shahtoosh trade is not brought to a halt'.
In theory, the chiru antelope is protected by legislation. It is listed in Appendix 1 of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora which was drawn up in July 1975. Incidentally, the WPSI report points out that the Himalayan ibex goat is also listed in Appendix 1 of CITES. The United Kingdom (and therefore Hong Kong) became a signatory in 1976. China joined in 1981. CITES covers all parts and derivatives of the species listed which means that, whatever way you look at it, shahtoosh shawls are illegal items. Trading in shahtoosh can mean a fine of $100,000 or a year's imprisonment.