Why 1,800 tigers are in a rundown China park: to be made into wine
Failing attraction in scenic Guilin, a tourist destination in southern China, is a pitiful front for a sinister trade in tiger bone wine, writes George Knowles
In a shabby, concrete arena of broken plastic seats, shrill pop music blasts out as a ringmaster in a purple suit uses a metal rod to strike a tiger balancing on top of a large plastic ball and moving in alarming jolts across the ring's dirty floor. The animal snarls half-heartedly as three other tigers stare impassively from a row of stools. Then, one after another, they go through a tired routine of stunts, jumping through hoops and sitting to order before being chased out of the ring into cages below.
There follows 25 minutes or so of tamer, but equally questionable, circus entertainment, such as chained bears and monkeys riding bicycles and a goat walking a high wire with a monkey clinging to its back, met with a smattering of applause from a pitifully small audience.
This sad spectacle plays out at 2.30pm every day at the Xiongsen Bear and Tiger Mountain Village, in Guilin, southwestern China, and - in the three decades since the park opened - has never been less popular or drawn smaller audiences than the rows of near-deserted seats suggest is the case now. This used to be one of the city's premier tourist attractions, but on a Thursday in March, when we visited, just three people attended the show. Two days later, there was a weekend afternoon audience of fewer than 30.
The venue looks for all the world like an outdated wildlife park on the brink of closure, but employees say the park will soon be moved by its tycoon owner, Zhou Weisen, to a site 8km away that is three times the size. What's more, rather than declining in line with the falling visitor numbers, the tiger numbers are booming and the park now claims to be home to the world's biggest captive population: more than 1,800 animals. According to the most recent data, globally only 3,890 tigers exist in the wild.
