Despite laws protecting pangolins, an investigation at major trade hubs found consumption and trade of the nearly extinct animal to be pervasive and brazen.
At a store in Mandalay, a man surnamed Lian handed us three small parts of one of Myanmar's most critically endangered animals, the pangolin.
The venue was a fitting place for the exchange. Antelope and deer heads hung on walls behind us. Teak chairs, decorated with leopard skins, had armrests made from animal horns.
Lian was not surprised when he heard our request to buy pangolin scales. He took two black plastic bags filled with scales. The weight of each bag was about half a kilo. One bag consisted of brown large and thick scales purportedly coming from India. The other bag was full of smaller and darker scales, which he said, came from "people in the mountains."
We were not the only ones who had inquired him about buying parts of the rare animal. We asked him if he could deliver 100 kilograms of pangolin scales to China every month. Not a problem, he said, asking for 530,000 kyats (about $350) per kilo.
Lian was one of dozens of people we met in Myanmar as we traveled the country in November, trying to find out how widespread the trafficking of the critically engendered animal was. To gain access, and to protect our safety, we had to work undercover, claiming to be wildlife traders or traffickers.
Although we had expected to find the occasional trafficker, and perhaps with ties to other countries, we did not expect the trade was so ubiquitous, especially in a country with no traditions of consuming the animal.
In Yangon, Mandalay, Mong La, Tachilek, and Myawaddy, we came across both live pangolins, ready to be killed for cooking or processing, and dead ones, with scales to be sold to traffickers and traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) practitioners.
According to the Protection of Biodiversity and Protected Areas Law that went into force in 2018, the Chinese and the Malayan pangolins are among the most protected species in Myanmar.
A person convicted of killing, hunting, wounding, or trading in pangolins or their parts can be jailed for three to 10 years, and fined up to one million kyat ($668).
Our findings, however, raise serious questions about the efforts of law enforcement to crack down on wildlife smuggling. This may also be due to the limited resources of law enforcement: Even when wildlife crime is rampant, it isn't necessarily a top priority.
According to Naing Zaw Tun, the director of the Nature and Wildlife Conservation Division of the Forest Department, the government has run public awareness campaigns, collaborated with advocacy groups and trained law enforcement officials in border areas.
But he concedes that it is “unable to control illegal trade markets located in border regions, where there is little law enforcement and there is a growing number of online markets.” He points to a lack of human resources, funding and technology as the main challenges the government faces when trying to enforce the law.
Since the new conservation law was enacted in May 2018, six people have been convicted in trafficking in pangolins and 284.5 kilograms of pangolin scales have been seized, according to government figures.
While these numbers are low, they reflect an improvement. Between 1994 – the year the last version of the law was enacted – and 2018, only 46 people were punished for crimes related to pangolin trafficking – an average of two people each year. In addition, since last year the authorities have seized more scales than they have in the preceding 24 years.
Over the past 11 months, more than 30 journalists across 15 countries and territories have conducted a joint investigation on how illegal pangolin trafficking is leading the species to extinction.
Our global report “The Pangolin Reports” and the subsequent reporting reveal that criminal syndicates in Africa and Asia are working together — and competing against each other — to meet the seemingly insatiable demand for pangolins in China and other markets.
Our investigation in Myanmar finds that the country is a major transit route of illegal wildlife smuggling to China. Smuggling syndicates can go about their trade in Myanmar, with little to no risks and consequences to their bosses.
The trade is part of a larger problem – this was obvious during our interaction with Lian when we visited his store in Mandalay. Hoping to further incite our feigned interest, Lian asked a teenage boy to show us his other goods: elephant skin, ivory Buddha statues, and bear biles.
Illegal pangolin trade is almost always part of wider illicit trade networks. Our investigations have lifted the veil on some of them.
PART I: SMUGGLING
To understand how smuggling works in Myanmar, one has to go to the famous jade market in Mandalay, the country’s second biggest city; exit at its west gate; and then walk about 100 meters.
There, very close to what is the beating heart of Myanmar's trade with China, logistics companies are eager to transport all the desired precious stones, raw materials and processed goods to the Chinese border and beyond.
All traders said that it was easy to smuggle goods to China. Shipments within China, however, were a much harder, challenging feat to accomplish.
It didn't take long for us to find companies willing to transport pangolin scales to China. Again, we pretended to be traders who were looking for ways to get our illegal goods there.
One of these logistics companies is called Shun Feng Myanmar, which is not – as the owner, surnamed Zhao, assured us – tied to or even named after China's second-largest logistics company, even though it has the same name.
Zhao has lived in Mandalay for four years. He knows well the route from Mandalay to Ruili, a Chinese border town, to Kunming, the capital of China's southwestern Yunnan province. But, he warned us that shipments can take time. He said it took him three months last year to get 1.5 kilograms of pangolin scales to China in three deliveries. -The hardest part of the journey, he said, was the final stretch. There were at least three checkpoints along the route from Ruili to Kunming, he warned.
Nearby, the manager of the local contractor for ZTO Express, a Chinese logistics company, surnamed Le, assured us that smuggling could be done.
"We are already familiar with this route," he said. "We have our own 9.6-meter-long truck. We can hide your goods by separating them into different packs and mix them with other items."
He also warned that the trickiest part of the journey was within China, after Ruili. Domestic security checks at the Chinese logistics company require real names and can be strict, he said. "But anything can be done if you can afford the price," he said.
A spokesperson of the Shanghai-based logistics company ZTO confirmed that the office we visited is a franchise store. He said that the company does not tolerate smuggling and has strict protocols in place, using scanning machines to thoroughly check all shipments.
He said that the company would investigate the smuggling offer made to us. If true, he said, the contractor would face penalties.
Unlike the logistics store manager, a Chinese-Burmese businesswoman surnamed Ma didn't believe our cover story. She suspected that we were Chinese undercover police officers, trying to bait criminals into admitting their trade. But she eventually lowered her guard.
Like others at the market, she assured us that pangolin scales were easy to get and transport through Myanmar. They also said that the smuggling was much harder within China.
She told us that it recently took nearly one year to send seven tiger bones to customers in the eastern Chinese province of Zhejiang. She also said that one of her smugglers was captured and jailed in China.
According to several traffickers, the border town of Ruili is the central passage into China of illegal wildlife, including pangolin scales. Ruili is the most significant thoroughfare for legal trade between the two countries. This is surprising, because it contradicts the widely held assumption that illegally traded goods such as pangolin are trafficked through remote rural areas.
To understand the trade patterns, we reviewed all publicly released related court records in China. Among the 45 criminal cases found in the Chinese penal record system between 2011 and 2018, three areas in Myanmar stand out again and again.
There's Myitkyina, the capital of Myanmar's northeastern Kachin State, which borders China. The town is under government control. Then there's also an area near Majaiyang, controlled by the Kachin Independence Army, a rebel group, with business ties to China. And there's Mong La, a notorious smuggling hub at the border to China in Shan State further south.
In most of these cases, the amounts of seized pangolin scales were small. Most of the people arrested and sentenced were Chinese nationals who appeared to have bought the scales for their personal use. (Although leading TCM experts insist that pangolin scales carry no medicinal value, some TCM practitioners still believe that the scales can cure all kinds of ailments.)
The arrests suggest that only petty consumers or mules get caught while the bosses of larger smuggling syndicates remain mostly untouched. The town most traffickers named as their hub of choice, Ruili, did not feature in the Chinese court rulings.
We then traveled to two of the most notorious border crossings for wildlife traffickers. For years, the Shan State towns of Mong La, bordering China, and Tachileik, bordering Thailand, have built reputations of lawlessness.
We wanted to see if the recently imposed new wildlife law has had any effect on the illegal trade. It appeared to have none.
In Mong La, pangolin products could be easily found. Traders clearly target Chinese consumers. Here, people speak mostly Mandarin and everything runs on Chinese time – 90 minutes ahead of Myanmar. The Chinese yuan is also preferred to the Burmese kyat.
We found several shops selling pangolin scales at the city's primary market. Still, traders were careful about offering transport across the border to China. One shop owner who also traded in dried elephant skin and tiger paws suggested that he would only discuss smuggling routes with "regular customers."
At another shop, pangolin skin could be seen drying in a tray. The shop's young vendor offered us several dozen kilos. When asked about the transportation to China, he said, "We don't do it by ourselves, someone else can do it for you if you have the money."
The town of Tachileik, at the Thai-Myanmar border, is infamous because it used to be the base of the Shan drug lord Khun Sa from the 1970s to the 1990s. While smuggling goes on, one thing has changed it fundamentally: the Internet.
In Tachileik, a TCM shop owner introduced us to a Chinese-speaking dealer. The dealer offered us the lowest price we've come across in Myanmar: 9,500 Thai baht ($310) per kilogram.
But, we never met the dealer in Tachileik in person. She would only communicate with us via WeChat.
This wasn’t unusual. Throughout Myanmar, wildlife traffickers rely on the Chinese messaging platform WeChat to communicate with each other. This adds an additional challenge to local law enforcement in its efforts to curb the illegal trade.
Online communication has also helped the trade go beyond its usual routes. A months-long online conversation with tech-savvy traffickers took us to Kayin State.
On the outskirts of Myawaddy, a town in Kayin State, on the border with Thailand, we visited the village of Shwe Kokko. There, a new large-scale real estate project by private Cambodian-Chinese investors is turning the once sleepy border town into a city of its own that already feels eerily like it were in China.
The new residents’ living standards appear to be high. They have Hummer trucks and two-door sports cars. A bowl of beef noodles at a street food stall costs a steep 180 Thai baht. In the words of one Chinese resident: "The price is the same as Shanghai."
But it was in this town, far away from the Chinese border, that we found the most apparent indication that the trade is organized by syndicates tied to even more sinister groups.
We met a Chinese man, who identified himself as Tianlong, nicknamed “Brother Long”, at his shop. At first, he tested us. His assistant, a young woman, showed us a bag of pangolin scales. They looked old and thin. We expressed dissatisfaction. They relaxed. We passed the test.
Brother Long walked to a freezer and took out two complete pangolin skins. The oil under the scales was still fresh.
He claimed he has several such stores, including in Muse, a town right across the border from Ruili. He also said he has ties to an armed group in northern Myanmar, and his connections would handle logistics and delivery into China.
After a phone call with an associate, his assistant told us that they had 100 kilos of pangolin scales in stock and that they could arrange to shipment through Ruili. She estimated that it would take 15-20 days for the scales to reach Guangdong.
She said the price is 3,000 yuan ($430) per kilo, including shipping, but advance payment would be required. Brother Long said he promised a refund should the shipment be intercepted.
"We ship goods like an ordinary courier," he said. "There will be a mail tracking number, and they will be delivered to you. Of that, you can be rest assured."
Part II: CONSUMPTION
If you want to travel to Myanmar to buy pangolins, you just need to fly in to the airport and then take a short walk. Shops at the Seasons of Yangon Hotel, some 300 meters from Terminal 1 of Yangon International Airport, offer different types of pangolin scales and pangolin scale powder.
“Pangolin scales, freshly ground on site,” an ad for a pharmacy there reads. The owner, who hails from China’s Fujian province, recommends that we buy pulverized scales instead of intact scales to avoid detection at the airport.
While tourists can’t miss the anti-trafficking posters all over the airport, warning travelers of the penalties imposed on wildlife smuggling, the trade itself is rampant. The illegal product is sold openly in a hotel lobby, with shops giving advice how to avoid detection.
It turns out that Seasons of Yangon International Airport Hotel offers more. You can eat pangolins there too.
Most of the space on the first floor of the hotel is occupied by a restaurant called Xiang Yuan Ge. It is well-known in Yangon’s Chinese community for a place that offers wildlife menu. Its signature dish is pangolin.
With its redwood furniture, the ubiquitous scent of white wine, and the sound of Chinese chatter, it is a restaurant that could fit into an upscale hotel anywhere in China.
Only its Burmese staff reminded us that we were in fact in Myanmar. “We have bear palms and pangolins,” the restaurant’s Fukienese manager told us, as we led him to believe that we were customers.
“We serve pangolins braised, grilled, and in a hot pot. Usually, we braise half, grill the other, and use the blood for fried rice. One kilogram will cost 168,000 kyat. There is no need to order in advance,” he said. He gave us his card, which identified him as Ah Jiang, which is possibly a nickname.
“We have them now and every day,” Jiang said. “We have been doing this for more than a decade.”
When we asked to see a pangolin to make sure the food is fresh, Jiang ordered one of his staff to bring an animal. He returned from the kitchen holding a specimen, which looked ragged and motionless and threw it on the grey-tiled floor.
We contacted Jiang again a few weeks after our visit and identified ourselves as journalists. On the phone, Jiang claimed that pangolins were only rarely served at the hotel and that he was unaware of any laws protecting pangolins. He declined to put us in contact with the restaurants’ owners. The Seasons of Yangon hotel did not respond to requests for comment.
As part of “The Pangolin Reports,” journalists have inquired about pangolin meat in more than 14 countries. In most places, suppliers are careful and suspicious. It took days, weeks, and sometimes months to get to buy an animal. They all know that their trade is illegal.
But episodes like this at the Xiang Yuan Ge restaurant, right next to Myanmar’s main international airport, suggest that the country is unlike any other transit hub in Southeast Asia. Consumption is more open than anywhere else.
Chinese restaurants in Yangon and other parts of Myanmar told us that pangolins were available. Restaurateurs told us that it was cheaper to eat pangolins here than in China – the price in Myanmar is only one-third or one-quarter of that in illegal restaurants in China. And they assured us that pangolins, along with bear paws, are among the most-requested wildlife dishes.
But where do these restaurants get their pangolins from? We found the answer from a Chinese-speaking woman selling medicinal products a stall at a market in Mong La, at the border with China.
Undaunted by the presence of three policemen standing three meters away, she asked us how many of the animals we needed and how many people we wanted to feed. The delivery of the ordered animals just required a phone call.
On the same day, we witnessed a similar scene in Tachilek, at the border to Thailand. At a roadside market, a man tried to transfer a pangolin from a white nylon bag to a bamboo basket to better show us the animal he wanted to sell us.
But the pangolin knocked over the basket and almost got away. The attempted escape caused a commotion, and several passers-by turned to watch. But no one, not even the traffic police officer standing at the market’s entrance, was surprised to see the critically endangered animal there, being traded illegally.
In the end, a fellow trader, an ethnic Akha woman, caught the pangolin at its tail and swiftly put it back in the nylon bag. Her experience in handling wildlife was made more evident by the rope around her wrist that tied her to a small monkey on her side.
Editing: Patrick Boehler, Yenni Kwok
This article is part of The Pangolin Reports, a news initiative by the Global Environmental Reporting Collective to investigate the illegal wildlife trade of pangolins across Asia, Africa and Europe. A Chinese-language version of this article appeared on Initium Media. The ADM Capital Foundation in Hong Kong supported reporting expenses.
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