Shenzhen Safari Park

This guide to Shenzhen Safari Park opens with a species on the edge: the last wild South China tiger vanished in the 1980s, and every one alive today lives in a zoo. It traces the park's own history, opening in 1993 as China's first zoo without cages, when every major zoo in the country still kept animals behind iron bars, and how that changed the way China thought about exhibiting wildlife. The guide follows the tigers themselves back to a genetic bottleneck of just six wild-caught animals, and the breeding program that has run since 1994 trying to keep the line going.