SOUTHSIDE SECRETS

The last tiger

Growls, gunshots and gardening forks. Nicole Slater reports on what happened to Stanley’s last tiger.

Hanging on the wall in a dark corner of Tin Hau Temple in Stanley is a tiger skin. Blackened by incense smoke and frankly rather crispy-looking, it is accompanied by a sign that claims it is the skin of the last tiger on Hong Kong Island, which was shot outside Stanley Police Station in June 1942 by Indian policeman Rur Singh.

It’s a good story and Singh certainly shot

a tiger, but there’s some debate about what happened to it. Some accounts claim the tiger was sent to the Government House, where it was eaten by the occupying Japanese and its skin was sent to Japan to be stuffed.

In his book, Prisoner of the Turnip Heads, Stanley prisoner-of-war George Wright-Nooth says the 240-pound tiger was skinned by a fellow prisoner named Bradbury, who had worked as a butcher at Dairy Farm, after nights of terrorising the internment camp.

Wright-Nooths diary entry for May 30 1942 reads: “last night Langston and Dalziel who were sleeping outside at the back of the bungalow were woken up at about 5am by snarls and growls. Langston at Dalziels instigation, got up to have a look. He went to the edge of the garden and looked down the slope to the wire fence. There Dalziel saw him leap into the air and fly back into the boiler room shouting ‘there’s a tiger down there’. Next morning on being told the story we were inclined to laugh.”

But a tiger there was. Gunshots rang out the following night and next morning the prisoners watched as the hillside was thoroughly searched by Chinese and Indian police under Japanese supervision. A camp supervisor told Wright-Nooth an Indian policeman had been mauled at 2am.

Sleeping in a room with no windows or doors, the understandably nervous prisoners set their own tiger guards, two men armed with a gang and a gardening fork, until the tiger was caught later in June.

In another book about the Stanley Camp, Hong Kong Internment 1942-1945, Geoffrey Charles Emerson says the tiger was stuffed and “put on exhibition in the city and attracted a great many viewers.” Some of the meat was given to members of the Hong Kong Race Club and “was as tender and as delicious as beef.”

There’s also debate about exactly where the tiger came from. On rare occasions, tigers had been known to swim across the harbour to Hong Kong Island but Wright-Nooth writes that the big cat shot in Stanley is likely to have been released from a circus that was performing in Causeway Bay at the time of the Japanese invasion.

Whatever the truth, the skin has long been revered for its magical properties. One story even credits it with saving the temple - and hundreds of people sheltering inside from two wartime bombs that failed to explore after being dropped nearby.