Can the world’s rarest mammal, the Hainan gibbon, be brought back from the brink?

In tiny villages, home to Li and Miao communities, the tattooed old folk still tell stories about gibbons. Stories about the pair of orphans driven out by an evil stepmother, who hid in the trees and turned into apes; or the bet between the gibbon and the earthworm over who could climb the best. Few of these storytellers, however, have seen a gibbon.

The tales are told in Hainan, China’s southernmost province. Once a sleepy backwater, the island is now a top tourist destination, known for its white-sand beaches and golf courses. It is also the last stand of the Hainan gibbon. Forget orangutans, tigers and giant pandas: with just 26 or so left, this is the world’s rarest mammal.

The Hainan gibbon has had it tough for some time. Visiting naturalists in the 19th century described the apes as rare. They were hunted heavily. Boiling a whole animal for a few days until it was reduced to a hairy paste was said to produce a potent traditional medicine. Chopsticks made from their long arm bones could supposedly be used to test for poison. Later, its forests were chopped down for timber and to make way for agriculture, worsening the ape’s plight.

By the 1980s, the species was in dire straits, with only a few survivors in remote, forested mountains. They may have been saved by sheer luck. In one story, shortly after a hunter shot one of the last gibbons, his entire family died of some horrible disease, and killing gibbons became bad luck. Whether or not the story is true, a handful of animals some­how clung on in a nature reserve at Bawangling. I was privi­leged to come face-to-face with some of these survivors early one morning in 2010. There were seven of them, feeding, playing and grooming in the treetops: more than a quarter of all the Hainan gibbons left on Earth.