| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3

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| Book Review | Environmental History, 8.3 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Tiger and the Pangolin: Nature, Culture, and Conservation in China. By Chris Coggins. Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 2002. xi + 330 pp. Illustrations, maps, notes, bibliography, index. $55.00.

Tigers are an endangered species in China. Known there as "the lord of the hundred beasts," tigers have figured prominently in Chinese conceptions of the natural order, in mythologies, and in people's relations to the natural world. As recently as the 1940s, there may have been thousands of tigers in Southeast China, while today there are at most dozens. The pangolin—a scaly ant-eater that lives in neat burrows in the ground—does not sit at the top of the food chain, and is not even tiger prey, but because of its connection with the earth, is considered to have magical qualities. In this book, the tiger and the pangolin not only are real subjects—Coggins is concerned with their fates in the South China province of Fujian—but they also represent a larger dynamic: tigers, the distant central state (whether imperial or Communist) with its interests and habits, the pangolin, the local rustics with their knowledge of local conditions. So in this book, Coggins sets out to examine the history and present conditions that interweave the lives of rural peoples, tigers, pangolins (and other wildlife), and the state.

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