On an early summer morning in the Vietnamese tourist town of Ha Long, we meet a man surnamed Chen at a bar that will soon turn to its daytime trades of milk tea and currency exchange.
There is an oft-used land route from Laos through Vietnam to China, according to our review of local media reports from 2011 to 2019. Over 3,000 live pangolins have been seized while being trafficked in a total of 44 seizure cases in the land route that extends from Cau Treo at the Laotian border to Móng Cái at the Chinese border.
It seems that the crossing of checkpoints here is a mere formality in lives lived on both sides. Residents in both towns said that they used special passes, allowing them to cross the border with minimal checks, as long as their stays were brief and limited to the border area. The going rate for pangolins is 1,250 renminbi per kilogram, which brings a live animal of about 5 kilograms to 5,000-6,000 renminbi. He said that thanks to bribes and connections, delivering to China would not be a problem.Deep in Taiwan's Luanshan forest in the dark of the night, Yu Man-jung spotted some tracks on the ground."There was a pangolin just here," Yu pointed out to the team of researchers behind him.
"Without a local to lead the way, we would not have been able to find pangolins, no matter how advanced our technology is," said Hsun. Hsun, who has tracked down 47 wild pangolins in 8 years of research, jokingly calls himself"the man who has collected the most pangolin faeces in the world." Taiwan today has become a success story in pangolin conservation, but things were different just half a century ago. From the 1950s to the 1970s, Taiwan exported nearly 60,000 pangolin leather pieces every year. As a result, pangolins almost became extinct.
Just last year, Kaohsiung customs officials intercepted 3,880 descaled and disemboweled pangolin bodies in a container that originated from Malaysia. In another notable seizure, the Coast Guard Administration seized 5 Taiwan pangolins, along with Asian yellow pond turtles and yellow-margined box turtles in 2015.Today, Hsun has honed his skills at finding wild pangolins, although he admits that he mostly relies on luck.