Of all the creatures in the animal kingdom, the tiger is arguably the most widely depicted in the Chinese culture. It is seen as a symbol of power and strength and a subject of awe and fear. Of the dozens of idioms originating from ancient fables on tigers, one says, "Once on the back of a tiger, it is impossible to dismount." This accurately describes Quan Li, founder of the multi-national charitable foundation Save China's Tigers (SCT). Only in the case of Quan, she is having the ride of her life and has no intention of dismounting.

Quan's eight-year-old foundation is devoted to the protection of the only indigenous tiger in China: the South China tiger or Panthera tigris amoyensis. Considered by scientists as the evolutionary ancestor of all other tigers, the South China tiger has become the world's most endangered tiger among the remaining five subspecies in the world. The last confirmed sighting of a wild South China tiger was at least 20 years ago. While optimistic Chinese tiger experts put the wild population at no more than 30, scattered in the mountains at the conjunction of three southern provinces, those less optimistic have declared wild South China tigers extinct.

Born in 1962 in Beijing, the year of the tiger in the Chinese astrological calendar, Quan has always been cat crazy. She was also born in an era when the wild South China tigers lost its last hectares of habitat to deforestation and were purged by organized national hunting and poachers.

The regal cats had previously lived in China's central and southern areas for tens of thousands of years, but were steadily squeezed into more remote and mountainous areas south of the Yangtze River at the beginning of the 1950s, following the encroachment of humankind. At that time their numbers were estimated at 4,000.

In the late 1950s, the State Forestry Administration (SFA) issued a national order, requiring hunters to kill off the four life-threatening animals, namely South China tigers, wolves, leopards and bears. Throughout the 1960s, under the national campaign supported by the military, many hunters were awarded the "hero hunter" title by the government after killing dozens of the tigers. Meanwhile, massive deforestation was taking place nationwide as farmers were encouraged to expand their farmland by reclaiming forests and mountains.

The tiger's luck turned in the 1970s. Tiger hunting was eventually outlawed in 1977 and the big cats were placed under first-level protection according to the Law on the Protection of Wild Animals adopted in 1988. Yet it was too late to save the animals.

Since the 1990s, the Chinese Government has strictly implemented bans on hunting of wild animals, including tigers, listed in the Law on Protection of Wild Animals. Quan first connected with the wild animal protection department of SFA in 1999 to discuss her project. With their cooperation she was able to secure a database on the South China tigers. Two years on, the tiger was singled out as one of 10 species for special protection in a 50-year timeline (2001-50) on protecting wildlife and improving natural reserves compiled by SFA.

Of China's over-2,000 nature reserves, 23, with a total area of 2,739,000 hectares have listed South China tigers as a major subject of protection, Cao Qingyao, spokesman of SFA told Xinhua in December 2007. At these natural reserves, virgin forests have been maintained and farmland has been reclaimed, all in an effort to restore the tigers' natural habitat. Due to these efforts, wild Siberian and Indo-Chinese tigers, which had disappeared in China for many years, have again been spotted in some natural reserves.

Since 2000, SFA has spearheaded several field surveys on the South China tigers, during which tiger traces have been found at 48 spots. The most recent expedition of this kind, initiated in November 2007, is headed by Wang Wei, Deputy Director of Department of Wildlife Protection of SFA, and consists of 10 experienced wild life experts, who have spent months on a 100,000-hectare search for the South China tiger in mountainous areas in central China.

Learning from Africa

In Chinese traditional arts, tiger is full of life and embodies the drive to achieve and make progress. Quan is definitely blessed with the tiger spirit. As the former worldwide head of licensing for Gucci, she wasted no time making a career U-turn. Business-savvy Quan was quick to see that a tiger conservation organization could be financially sustainable.

After observing and analyzing how wildlife conservation and eco-tourism had succeeded in Africa during a 1998 safari trip, Quan engineered a Chinese tiger conservation model in 1999. Copying the African method she planned to breed tigers and, then, reintroduce them to the wild, in the process seeing that the ensuing eco-tourism would bring in additional income for local farmers and raise awareness so that farmers would support wildlife conservation in these areas.

She also chose South Africa as the ideal place for her tiger re-wilding program, the first stage of her project. The two reasons were the availability of vast tracts of land at a relatively cheap price and the rich expertise and experience in reintroducing big carnivores to the wild.

Quan conducted her project in partnership with the National Wildlife Research & Development Center under SFA, which had agreed to send five to 10 zoo-bred Chinese tigers to Quan's South African reserve for breeding and wild training from 2003 to 2007. They would also prepare China's reserve sites for rewilded tigers. According to an agreement, the first batch of tigers would come to their new homes in China as early as 2008.

In 2002, Quan's husband Stuart Bray, an American investment banker and main source of finance of Quan's project, bought 33,000 hectares of land in South Africa made up of 17 defunct sheep farms as a reserve for the tiger re-wilding program. Since September 2003, five tigers, three males and two females, have been shipped to this reserve. One male died in August 2005 and a healthy male cub was born in November 2007, becoming the first South China tiger born out of China. Quan was expecting more cubs from two impregnated female tigers in 2008.

"The prey training for tigers has been so far successful," Lu Jun told Beijing Review. As the chief representative of the National Wildlife Research & Development Center at Quan's program, Lu has visited Quan's wild training camps in South Africa five times. Ten months after the first pair of tigers' arrival at Quan's re-wilding base, they caught and ate their first blesbok (African antelope), while the second pair took just seven months to accomplish the same thing. Lu said compared with another similar program in Meihuashan, Fujian Province, co-initiated by SFA in 1998, SCT was far more successful in restoring the tigers' capacity for wild life.

Perservering against all odds

But progress did not come without setbacks. Quan told Beijing Review that her fund-raising lobbying has been often handicapped by foreigners' ignorance of China's policies on wildlife protection. She said many people only knew that Chinese people made medicine out of tiger bones while not knowing that China has given up tiger hunting and eco-system destruction. While she actively promotes her efforts, she feels she is a lone voice in the wilderness spreading the news that China's ban on wild animal hunting has been more successful than many countries.

Another challenge comes from bigger multinational wild animal conservation organizations, which intentionally denigrated Quan's efforts for fear of losing their donors to South China tiger. Several large wild animal organizations proclaimed that as South China tigers had been extinct, donations should be made to conservation of more promising tiger subspecies. Quan said the attacks on SCT from established organizations like the International Fund for Animal Welfare had made fund- raising efforts much more difficult than she had expected.

Yet the most formidable problem for Quan and her colleagues is how to improve the genetic quality of new cubs in her breeding programs. Now the 70-or-so South China tigers in captivity are all the offspring of just six original tigers (two males and four females). This small tiger population, mostly encaged in a dozen zoos throughout China, have been highly inbred. Tiger cubs have for a long time had a high rate of birth defects and mortality. Chinese wild animal experts are still split on whether mating with other tiger species should be introduced to improve the quality of the South China tiger when newly captured wild tigers were still unavailable. And genetic science has to develop further to explain whether the current tiger population has enough genetic variability to prevent this species from dying out.

More bad news for Quan is that she might have to put off her plan of reintroducing South China tigers to China. The two pilot reserves, Zixi County of Jiangxi Province and Liuyang of Hunan Province, might not be able to finish their preparation to accommodate South China tigers on time, which involves protecting enough habitat -especially grassland and forests-that support a substantial prey base.

"Local residents need to be relocated and resettlement work needs coordination of different government departments," said Lu.

Despite all the surfacing difficulties and looming dangers, Quan seems undaunted. As she said in her message on the SCT website, she hopes that "the roar of the Chinese tiger will be heard echoing in the wilderness for generations to come."