When South China tigers roamed Hong Kong: maulings, devoured livestock, fleeing villagers – author hunts for forgotten stories
- Author John Saeki has been collecting oral history accounts, archive newspaper reports and other historic records of tiger sightings in Hong Kong
- He has found that beside two major cases – one in which two policemen were killed – there were many more sightings and incidents involving the big cats
Should you ever encounter a tiger in Hong Kong, run downhill. As the big cat’s front legs are shorter than its hind limbs, its descent will be awkward and give you the edge as you make an escape.
But since the last sightings of the South China tiger in Hong Kong were in the 1970s, that’s unlikely to be necessary. Villagers minding livestock or cutting grass on hillsides, however, would likely have grown up heeding that advice passed down from older generations.
Author and graphic designer John Saeki learned about this from a friend whose mother is an elderly villager in Hong Kong’s northeastern New Territories, near the Pat Sin Leng mountain range. His friend’s mother had once seen a partially devoured calf, presumably the result of a tiger attack, while her grandmother had actually seen a tiger.
Saeki, who is of Japanese and British descent and wrote the 2018 novel The Tiger Hunters of Tai O, has lived in Hong Kong for 20 years. He has been collecting oral history accounts of tiger sightings, and researching dozens of newspaper reports and other historic records. They show that besides two major cases which some Hong Kong people might remember – in 1915 and 1942 – when tigers were caught and killed, there were many more sightings.
The indications are that South China tigers sighted in the territory roamed the former British colony and lived close to humans, as they did in neighbouring Guangdong province.
As Saeki scoured articles from the start of the 20th century onwards, he pieced together the different reports. There were attacks on humans; terrified commuters on the Peak Tram who heard a tiger’s roar; a mauled calf; a half-devoured “coolie”; and a sighting of large paw prints. From what he has read, he concludes that some sightings were a single tiger.
