ANCIENT Chinese scripts, some etched on tortoise shells, first told of the benefits of the tiger in traditional medicinal cures. For at least a millennium, tiger has been the 'diamond of Chinese pharmacopoeia'.
'The reference to tiger bone was written down 1,000 years ago,' said Judy Mills, acting director of TRAFFIC (Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna In Commerce) Far East. The humerus - the long bone from the front legs - were regarded as the most efficacious medicines, the other bones were secondary. 'But now that tigers are so rare all the bones are used,' she said.
Chinese Materia Medica, Bernard E. Read's 1930s encyclopaedia, revealed that Chinese healers held tigers in such thrall that every part of the animal, from its nose to its faeces, was used in traditional Chinese medicine.
'It is the king of the mountain animals,' Read wrote. 'It is shaped like a cat and is the size of a cow. It roars like thunder . . . and comes when the moon is cloudy.
'The tiger has the power of divination.' It is these tales that raised the tiger to its mythical status and etched it into medical folklore, making it that much harder for conservation groups to halt the slaughter of the big cats to feed the lucrative market in tiger parts.
Ms Mills believes that this demand could see the demise of the tiger in the 14 states where it ranges in the wild. 'Probably the majority of people using Chinese medicine have stopped using tiger bone, but with only 5,000 tigers left in the world, that is not enough,' she said. 'We are coming to the point where the population is not sustainable.' Even if under one per cent of the Chinese population used tiger bone daily for rheumatism for a year, she said, tigers would last only a year. Current estimates put the tiger population at between 5,080 and 7,400, down from about 100,000 at the turn of the century.