Tiger Bone, Pangolin Scale, Bear Bile: The Classical Record and the Conservation Reality

Three Records From the Old Books — and Three Species the Modern World Is Fighting to Keep

A line from the old books

The Bencao Gangmu is a big book, and most of what it records is plant and mineral matter used every day — ginger, licorice, cinnabar, realgar. Tiger bone, bear bile, and pangolin scale are not that. Each is a minor entry, recorded once, cited by a handful of later authorities, never central to the book the way a staple herb is. We keep each entry exactly as written. But all three happen to come from animals the modern world has spent decades trying to keep from disappearing — and that fact deserves the same source-first treatment we gave rhino horn.

Tiger bone (hu gu)

Open the Bencao Gangmu (Volume 51, the beasts) to tiger bone (hu gu), recorded in the Bie Lu as a middle-grade entry. The nature-and-flavor line reads: "pungent, slightly hot, non-toxic." The record lists, among other uses, dispelling malign qi and toxin, settling fright palpitation, and — cited to Zhen Quan — treating sinew-bone wind impediment with spasm, stiffness, and roving pain.

That is the classical record. It sits beside a modern reality that has nothing to do with medicine and everything to do with survival.

• The tiger has been listed as Endangered on the IUCN Red List since 1986. The global population is estimated to have fallen from roughly 5,000–8,262 individuals in the late 1990s to about 3,726–5,578 by 2022. Every tiger population and subspecies sits on CITES Appendix I.
• China cancelled tiger bone's medicinal standard in the same 1993 notice that banned rhino horn. The State Council's Guo Fa 〔1993〕No. 39 (29 May 1993) states plainly: "cancel the medicinal standards for rhinoceros horn and tiger bone; henceforth neither may be used to make medicine." One notice, two species, one line.
• Modern pharmacology answered the gap it left with a manufactured substitute rather than a wild one: "bionic tiger bone powder" (仿生虎骨粉), made from non-endangered animal bone and matched to tiger bone's amino-acid and mineral profile, holds a China Food and Drug Administration approval (registration no. Z20030080) for treating joint pain. It is a modern, legal, and lawful answer to what the withdrawn substance was recorded for — no tiger required.

Bear bile (xiong dan)

Open the same volume to the bear (xiong) entry and its bile (dan). The Bencao Gangmu records bear bile's nature and flavor as "bitter, cold, non-toxic," noting one authority's caution that it is "incompatible with fangji and dihuang." It is credited, across several cited sources, with treating seasonal heat that turns to jaundice, summer dysentery, and — in Li Shizhen's own summary — clearing heat, calming the heart, calming the liver, and brightening the eyes. (This entry has not yet been extracted into MateriaTrace's live database as its own record; only bear fat, xiong zhi, has — see bear fat (xiong zhi) for the entity that is live today, and the note on that gap below.)

• The Asiatic black bear (Ursus thibetanus), the species most farmed for bile, is listed as Vulnerable on the IUCN Red List and sits on CITES Appendix I.
• Unlike rhino horn, tiger bone, and pangolin scale, bear bile was never simply banned outright — it moved, in China, onto licensed bile farms, a practice that has drawn sustained documentation and criticism from conservation and animal-welfare organizations for the confinement and extraction methods involved. China stopped licensing new bear farms in 1994; thousands of bears remain on existing farms today.
• The pharmacologically active compound in bear bile is ursodeoxycholic acid (UDCA) — bears are the only mammal that produces it in useful quantity naturally, but the molecule itself does not require a bear. Synthetic UDCA, made from cow or pig bile or from no animal source at all, has been manufactured and sold under names like Ursodiol and Ursofalk for decades; one 2008 estimate put annual synthetic UDCA use across China, Japan, and South Korea at roughly 100,000 kg.

Pangolin scale (chuan shan jia)

Open the Bencao Gangmu's scaled-creature volume to pangolin scale (chuan shan jia), recorded in the Bie Lu as a lower-grade entry, alongside a folk couplet Li Shizhen himself records: "chuan shan jia, wang bu liu — a woman who eats them will have milk that never stops flowing." The nature-and-flavor line reads "salty, slightly cold, toxic," and the record credits it, across cited sources, with unblocking the channels, promoting lactation, reducing abscess swelling, and freeing the orifices.

• Every one of the eight pangolin species has sat on CITES Appendix I since 2016, when 186 countries voted for a total commercial-trade ban, effective 2017.
• On the IUCN Red List, the Chinese pangolin (the species this entry names) has been Critically Endangered since 2014, its wild population estimated to have fallen more than 80% over three generations (about 21 years).
• China removed pangolin scale from the Chinese Pharmacopoeia in 2020, the same year it raised the Chinese pangolin's national protection status from Category II (where it had sat since 1989) to Category I — the country's highest protection tier.
• National Geographic states plainly: "Pangolin scales, like rhino horn, have no proven medicinal value," and that the scales "are made of keratin, the same material that makes up fingernails, hair, and horn."
• The constructive half of the record: the proverb above already paired pangolin scale with wang bu liu xing (Vaccaria seed) for the same lactation use, and a 2008 TRAFFIC report found the two herbs comparably effective for it — modern practice widely uses wang bu liu xing alone.

Why the classics could never have weighed this

None of this would have made sense to the authors who first wrote these lines down. The Bencao Gangmu was compiled in a world with no concept of a global species heading toward extinction, no CITES, no Red List, no chemistry that could say a scale is keratin or a bile's active compound can be built in a lab. Recording tiger bone, bear bile, or pangolin scale then meant describing what each was believed to do, in the vocabulary available at the time — nothing more, and nothing less honest than that.

The modern verdict is a different kind of statement entirely, built from tools and a global situation none of these authors had. The classical lines are an honest record of what books written centuries ago said. The conservation facts are a record of what the world knows and has decided now. Keeping them visibly separate — each with its own source — is what lets a reader tell which is which.

How MateriaTrace handles it: keep the record, source the rest

So each of these three entries arrives with layers standing on entirely different ground:

1. the classical entry — a recorded substance, its stated nature, flavor, and uses;
2. the modern reality — the species' protection status, the legal history, and, where one exists, the substitute practice turned to.

• The classical entry stays exactly as written — flagged as the classical record and, for these three, as historical record only, from an endangered or otherwise protected species. Nothing is quietly deleted.
• The modern facts sit in a separate layer, each carrying its own source, never edited into the classical text, and never framed as a reason to seek the original substance out.

Worth stating plainly: MateriaTrace records what sources say — classical and modern — and makes no treatment or usage recommendation. For tiger bone, bear bile, and pangolin scale there is an additional line we will not cross: nothing here should be read as encouraging the use, purchase, or acquisition of a product from an endangered or protected species. Where the modern world has withdrawn a substance, we record that, its sources, and any lawful substitute, and leave any medical question with a qualified professional.

Why keep a record for something now restricted

Deleting these three entries the moment the law changed would be tidier. It would also erase the most useful thing they demonstrate together: that a substance can sit quietly in a centuries-old book as a minor entry, and that the modern response to finding out the species behind it is disappearing was not to pretend the record never existed, but to keep it, flag it plainly, and place beside it both the legal history and whatever the world turned to instead.

See it on the entries themselves: open tiger bone (hu gu) and pangolin scale (chuan shan jia) to read the classical record in place, each flagged as historical and as an endangered species; bear fat (xiong zhi) carries the live entity for the bear, with bear bile's own record noted above pending its own entry. The same historical-record-only treatment covers rhino horn (xi jiao), the subject of a companion piece on the classical record and the ban, and musk (she xiang), another animal product for which modern practice turned to a substitute.

If this "every record clicks back to its own source" approach is useful to you, see what else is in MateriaTrace on the homepage.

MateriaTrace is a source-traceable, bilingual knowledge graph of Chinese medicine. It records how classical and modern sources describe each entry — each field traceable to its primary source, contradictions kept side by side — and makes no treatment or usage recommendations. Every record in this article can be checked on its entry page.