At first glance, nothing stands out about the Shennongge Medical Cuisine Hot Pot restaurant in Liuzhou, southern China, but you can get the meat of endangered animals here—if you know how to ask for it.
The restaurant provides an assortment of exotic dishes, among them stewed wattle-necked softshell turtle, chopped snake with spiced salt, the endangered giant salamander, and a strange but otherwise innocuous-sounding “sliced caterpillar fungus.”
The “fungus,” coming in at a whopping 1180 yuan (about $180) per order, is no fungus at all, but meat from the nearly-extinct Chinese pangolin.
Chinese pangolins are a relative of the anteater. The animal is about two feet long and is covered in armored scales. Only a few thousand are still alive in southern China and bordering states—a fraction of populations estimated in the 1970s. Pangolins are a prime target of poachers, who hunt the animals in their inaccessible and largely unregulated habitat.
By local belief, pangolin meat is good for blood circulation, depending on one’s body type.
