Dragging on a cigarette between his wrinkled lips, Hou Fengqi fingered a dusty bamboo bow and rusty iron-tipped arrows, before recounting his days as a "tiger hunting hero" in the rugged hills of southern China.
"The first tiger was the largest, around 150kg, and when we carried it back to the village, everyone ran out and cheered," said Hou with a gap-toothed grin, casting his mind back to 1959.
Hou, now 69, is one of China's last living tiger hunters - as rare a breed as the striped beasts he used to track in the misty, bamboo clad forests of Yihuang county in Jiangxi province.
"In the old days life was hard, so killing a tiger made me happy as it helped improve my family's livelihood," he said, sitting outside his wooden home beside verdant rice paddies.
While Hou bagged six South China tigers in his youth; hunting and deforestation have driven this keystone Chinese species close to extinction - with none seen or captured in the past 20 years.
Historically revered as an archetypal Chinese cultural symbol, the tiger's decline was accelerated by poaching for traditional Chinese medicine and "anti-pest" campaigns instigated by Chairman Mao Zedong from the 1950's, to rid the countryside of the cattle-raiding "vermin."
Thousands of tigers were killed off with hunters praised by the Communist Party and paid a 30 yuan bounty per tiger pelt.
Now one of the world's rarest and most elusive of mammals, the South China tiger is fully protected by the Chinese government, with no more than 10-20 wild individuals estimated to remain along the remote border areas of China's rapidly developing provinces of Guangdong, Jiangxi, Fujian and Hunan.
CAPTIVE TIGERS
While the wild status of Chinese tigers remains uncertain, there remain around 70 captive individuals, derived from just six wild-caught founders in the 1950's.
The last of their kind - these tigers have nevertheless suffered inbreeding, dismal caged conditions, low birth rates and a tainted lineage from hybridization with other tiger subspecies.
In 2003, the sluggish, ill-funded and fragmented tiger conservation scene took an unexpected twist, with a scheme to "rewild" South China tigers in a South African game reserve.
The radical concept of transplanting Chinese tigers to the African bush drew fire at first from experts, but its aim of rehabilitating tigers to hunt wild prey in a secure, fenced off wilderness - has led to the birth of five cubs, three of which have survived - giving the species vital new impetus.
The tigers will eventually be reintroduced back to the wild in China, with a site already earmarked in Zixi county in Jiangxi province.
"We want to release the tigers back into areas where they've been roaring for millions of years," said Quan Li, the head of Save China's Tigers, the conservation body behind the project.
