Pangolin Bones in Traditional Medicine: The Hidden Trade

By Pangolin Research Team • June 11, 2026 • 8 min read

When the international media covers pangolin trafficking, the story almost always centres on scales. Seizures of thousands of kilograms of dried pangolin scales make dramatic news, and the scale trade is indeed vast. But focusing exclusively on scales risks obscuring a broader and more complete picture of demand: bones, meat, blood, and even fetal pangolins are traded alongside — or instead of — scales, and together they represent a whole-animal extraction that makes every pangolin a target from multiple angles of commerce.

This article examines the trade in pangolin body parts other than scales, with a focus on how bones and other tissues are used in traditional medicine and luxury consumption across parts of Asia. Understanding the full spectrum of demand is essential for designing effective conservation responses, because interventions that target scale trafficking alone may fail to address the wider market that drives pangolin hunting.

What Gets Traded: The Full-Animal Demand Problem

Pangolin scales — known in traditional Chinese medicine by the name Chuan Shan Jia — receive by far the most documented attention from researchers and law enforcement. They are lightweight, durable, easily transported, and have a long history of use in Chinese pharmacopoeial traditions. But scales are only one component of what traffickers seek.

Pangolin bones are traded across parts of China, Vietnam, and Southeast Asia for use in traditional medicine preparations. A single adult pangolin yields approximately 200 to 400 grams of usable bone after processing — a modest yield compared to larger animals, but one that commands a significant price relative to its weight in illicit markets. The bones are processed in several ways depending on the intended use: dried whole, charred and ground into powder, or boiled into a decoction that is consumed as a medicinal broth.

Pangolin blood is consumed fresh in some contexts, or mixed into rice wine and drunk as a tonic. Folk medicine traditions in parts of southern China and Vietnam attribute blood consumption with benefits for circulatory health and general vitality, though these claims are not supported by clinical evidence and have no basis in pharmacology. The consumption of fresh blood typically occurs at the point of slaughter, often at restaurants or private events where live pangolins are killed to order.

Pangolin meat, meanwhile, occupies a different category: it is primarily a luxury food rather than a medicinal product. In high-end restaurants in parts of China and Vietnam, pangolin meat has been served as a status dish at significant expense per kilogram. The consumption of pangolin meat as a signal of wealth and social standing — rather than as a health remedy — represents a distinct demand driver that has proven particularly resistant to awareness campaigns, since it is tied to social norms around prestige and hospitality rather than health beliefs.

Pangolin Bones in Traditional Chinese Medicine

The medicinal use of pangolin bones in Chinese traditional medicine is less formally documented than the use of scales, and this distinction is significant. Pangolin scales (Chuan Shan Jia) have historically appeared in classical Chinese materia medica texts and, until recently, were listed in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia — the official compilation of approved traditional medicines maintained by the Chinese government. The 2020 edition of the Chinese Pharmacopoeia removed pangolin scales from the national medical insurance reimbursement list, a meaningful policy step that reduced incentives for large-scale commercial use.

Pangolin bones, by contrast, do not appear in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia (2020 edition) as a recognised and approved medicinal substance. Their use sits more firmly in the domain of folk medicine and informal traditional practice rather than the formally regulated system of Chinese medicine. This distinction matters for enforcement: bones traded without pharmacopoeial listing occupy a grey area that is not addressed by the same regulatory frameworks that govern scale trade.

In folk medical use, pangolin bones are most commonly associated with conditions involving joints and connective tissue — rheumatism, arthritis, bone pain, and limb weakness. The logic of this association follows a principle found in many traditional systems: that consuming the bones of a strong animal transfers strength or healing properties to the patient's own skeletal system. While this reasoning is not pharmacologically sound, it has proven durable across generations of practice.

Preparation methods vary. Bone powder is sometimes mixed into soups or decoctions alongside other herbal ingredients. Charred bone, produced by roasting the dried bones until they blacken, is used in some formulations and is believed in folk tradition to have specific heat-clearing or detoxifying properties. Bone broth made by simmering pangolin bones for extended periods is consumed in parts of Guangdong province and Vietnam, where it is attributed with general restorative properties.

"The formal removal of pangolin scales from China's pharmacopoeial insurance list in 2020 was a landmark policy step. But it did not extinguish demand, nor did it address the parallel market for bones, blood, and meat that operates largely outside formal regulatory oversight."

The Fetal Pangolin Trade

Among the most disturbing aspects of the whole-animal trade is the demand for fetal pangolins — unborn young taken from pregnant females. In some folk traditions, the fetus of a pangolin is believed to carry especially concentrated medicinal or tonic properties, a belief that has no scientific basis but that has contributed to market demand for pregnant females. A pregnant female thus represents double value to a trafficker: the adult animal itself plus the fetus it carries.

This dynamic compounds the conservation harm of pangolin hunting in a particularly severe way. Pregnant females are at a critical stage of their reproductive cycle; removing them eliminates not only their current pregnancy but their entire remaining reproductive potential. Given the pangolin's already limited reproductive rate — typically one pup per year — the targeted or incidental hunting of pregnant females constitutes a disproportionate blow to population viability.

Why Bones Are Harder to Detect in Trafficking Seizures

One reason the bone trade receives less attention than the scale trade is a practical one: bones are difficult to identify and attribute to pangolins once they have been processed. Dried, charred, or ground bone loses many of the morphological features that allow wildlife forensic scientists to identify species of origin. Powdered bone can be mixed with other substances, packed inside capsules or pill forms, or labelled as an entirely different ingredient. This makes detection at borders and in markets significantly harder than identifying pangolin scales, which retain distinctive physical characteristics even when dried.

Trafficking data therefore almost certainly underreports the scale of the bone trade relative to its actual volume. Seizure statistics, which form the basis of most quantitative analyses of pangolin trafficking, capture what enforcement agencies can detect and prove. The bone trade's inherent resistance to detection means it may be more substantial than the available data suggests.

Trade Routes and Market Structure

The trafficking of pangolin body parts — scales, bones, and whole animals — follows well-documented routes through Southeast Asia. Myanmar and Laos function as major transit hubs, with pangolins originating from across Africa and Southeast Asia passing through these countries en route to consumer markets concentrated in China and Vietnam. The involvement of organized criminal networks in pangolin trafficking has been documented by multiple law enforcement agencies and non-governmental organizations, and pangolin products frequently travel alongside other contraband.

Within China, demand is geographically concentrated in certain provinces — Guangdong, Guangxi, and Yunnan among the highest — where traditional medicine use and luxury food consumption intersect with proximity to land borders. In Vietnam, demand is similarly concentrated in urban centers and among wealthy consumers for whom pangolin meat and blood products carry social cachet. Online platforms have added a new dimension to the trade, with pangolin products advertised through encrypted messaging applications and social media platforms in ways that are difficult for law enforcement to monitor systematically.

Demand Reduction: What Works

Conservation organizations have invested significantly in demand reduction campaigns targeting pangolin consumption in China and Vietnam. Research by groups including Traffic and WWF has found that awareness of pangolin endangerment is relatively high among urban, educated, younger consumers in China — and that this awareness correlates with reduced stated intention to purchase pangolin products. This is an encouraging signal, and campaigns that frame pangolin consumption as socially unacceptable among younger demographics have shown some promise.

The challenge is that the consumers most amenable to behavior change are not always the primary drivers of demand. Older, wealthier consumers who consume pangolin meat as a status symbol, or who use traditional bone preparations as part of long-established health practices, have proven more resistant to awareness-based interventions. Effective demand reduction in these segments may require complementary approaches — economic deterrence through enforcement, engagement with traditional medicine practitioners on substitution alternatives, and sustained social norm change over longer timeframes.

The whole-animal nature of pangolin demand means that addressing any single product category in isolation — whether scales, bones, or meat — is insufficient. Comprehensive protection requires understanding and targeting all components of the market simultaneously. For more on the conservation challenges facing pangolins, see our coverage of global pangolin conservation efforts and the reproductive biology that makes population recovery so slow.