Pangolin Traditional Medicine Demand in Asia: Scales, Science and Cultural Change

Every year, tens of thousands of pangolins are killed for their scales. The animals are poached across sub-Saharan Africa and South-East Asia, their bodies boiled and dried, their scales stripped and packed into sacks before beginning journeys that end in traditional medicine markets in China and Vietnam. The pangolin is now the most heavily trafficked wild mammal on Earth, and the engine driving that traffic is consumer demand rooted in centuries of traditional medical practice. Understanding pangolin traditional medicine demand in Asia means examining both the history of that practice and the scientific verdict on whether it has any basis in pharmacology.

The Role of Pangolin Scales in Traditional Chinese Medicine

Pangolin scales enter traditional Chinese medicine under the name chuanshanjia — literally, "the armour that crosses the mountain." References to their therapeutic properties appear in Chinese medical texts dating back at least to the Tang dynasty, roughly 1,400 years ago, and the ingredient has featured in successive editions of the Compendium of Materia Medica and other authoritative pharmacopoeia-like compendia ever since.

Within the TCM framework, pangolin scales TCM use centres on the concept of promoting the movement of blood and dissolving what practitioners call blood stasis — a condition linked in classical theory to pain, swelling, menstrual irregularity and poor circulation. The scales are typically dried and dry-fried or vinegar-fried before being ground into powder and combined with herbal decoctions. Specific indications listed in classical texts include stimulating milk production in nursing mothers, draining abscesses, and alleviating skin conditions such as eczema and psoriasis.

This long-standing role in an elaborate medical tradition is not the result of cynicism or deliberate fraud. The practitioners who developed and transmitted these prescriptions were working within a coherent theoretical system, and many of their patients reported improvement — outcomes that can plausibly be attributed to the placebo response, to the effects of the herbal components prescribed alongside scales, and to the passage of time rather than to any active compound in the scales themselves.

What Science Says: No Proven Medicinal Value

Pangolin scales are composed almost entirely of keratin — the same fibrous structural protein that forms human fingernails, hair and the hooves of cattle. When scales are processed by the methods traditional medicine prescribes, the keratin is hydrolysed into constituent amino acids. Those amino acids are indistinguishable, chemically and biologically, from the amino acids derived by hydrolysing any other keratin-rich material — including pig trotters, bovine horn or synthetic pharmaceutical-grade keratin produced at low cost in laboratories.

No peer-reviewed clinical trial has demonstrated that pangolin scale preparations produce a therapeutic effect that cannot be explained by the placebo response or by the pharmacological activity of co-administered plant ingredients. Systematic reviews of the published literature — including reviews conducted by researchers working within the TCM tradition — have consistently found that the evidence for the specific claimed indications is absent or methodologically too weak to support clinical recommendation.

This matters beyond the confines of pharmacology. When a remedy has no demonstrable therapeutic benefit, the social cost of maintaining belief in that remedy — in this case, the effective extinction of eight species of pangolin — is entirely without medical justification.

Countries Driving Demand: China and Vietnam

China

China is the world's largest consumer of pangolin products and has been the primary destination for pangolin scales seized in international law enforcement operations. Demand is distributed across multiple channels: licensed traditional medicine pharmacies, unlicensed street markets, online platforms and, for live animals and meat, high-end restaurants and private banquets where serving rare wildlife has historically carried social prestige.

The Chinese pangolin (Manis pentadactyla), historically the domestic source for the country's TCM industry, is now listed as Critically Endangered by the IUCN after suffering precipitous population declines throughout the twentieth century. As domestic supply collapsed, pangolin demand in China drew increasingly on imports — first from South-East Asia, and then, as those populations too collapsed, from Africa. This cascade of regional depletion illustrates the ecological reach of concentrated consumer demand in a single large market.

A pivotal regulatory development occurred in 2020 when China's National Medical Products Administration removed pangolin scales from the official list of approved ingredients in the Chinese Pharmacopoeia. This decision withdrew state endorsement from the ingredient and restricted the ability of licensed pharmaceutical manufacturers to incorporate scales into mass-produced patent medicines. It did not immediately eliminate demand, but it represented the most significant policy concession by any major consumer country and was widely interpreted as signalling a trajectory toward further restriction.

Vietnam

Vietnam occupies a dual role in the pangolin trade: it is simultaneously a significant consumer market and a major transit hub through which pangolin products sourced in Africa and elsewhere in Asia flow toward Chinese consumers. The Sunda pangolin (Manis javanica), native to Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia and Indonesia, has been reduced to Critically Endangered status in part by domestic Vietnamese demand.

Vietnamese traditional medicine — drawing on both indigenous thuoc nam practices and the Chinese-influenced thuoc bac tradition — prescribes pangolin scales for broadly similar purposes to those described in TCM: blood circulation, pain relief, skin conditions and post-natal care. As in China, demand is concentrated among older, wealthier consumers, and scales are sometimes purchased as high-value gifts intended to convey respect and care for elderly relatives.

The pangolin demand in Vietnam is complicated by enforcement challenges. Vietnam's borders are long and porous, wildlife crime law has historically been under-enforced relative to the gravity of offences, and penalties imposed on traffickers have in many cases been insufficient to deter organised criminal networks for whom the profit margins in pangolin trading far exceed those available in lower-risk commodity smuggling.

Scale of the Trade

Quantifying an illegal trade is inherently difficult, but seizure data and wildlife crime databases maintained by organisations such as TRAFFIC provide a lower-bound estimate of the problem's magnitude. Between 2016 and 2019 alone, law enforcement agencies around the world intercepted approximately 206 tonnes of pangolin scales — a volume representing roughly 400,000 individual animals. Researchers applying detection-rate modelling to these figures estimate that seized quantities may represent no more than ten to twenty percent of the true trade volume, implying that the actual number of pangolins killed over that four-year period was substantially higher.

Seizures of this scale are not isolated events. Operations in Nigeria, Cameroon, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Malaysia, Indonesia and Singapore have each resulted in multi-tonne consignments being intercepted, frequently destined for ports in mainland China or Hong Kong. The logistics involved — refrigerated containers, forged permits, corrupt customs officials — point to well-capitalised criminal organisations rather than opportunistic local poachers acting alone.

Demand Reduction Campaigns and What They Have Learned

A number of conservation organisations have invested significantly in demand reduction programmes targeted at consumers in China and Vietnam. The most prominent approaches include celebrity-driven public awareness campaigns, social media engagement, partnerships with TCM practitioners, and the promotion of scientifically validated herbal and synthetic substitutes for scale preparations.

What Works

Research into behaviour change in the context of wildlife consumption consistently finds that campaigns are most effective when they work with respected voices within the consumer community rather than against the entire tradition. Partnerships with TCM practitioners who are willing to publicly endorse alternatives carry more weight with patients than messages from external conservation organisations. In China, celebrity endorsements from figures trusted by target demographics — particularly younger, urban consumers — have reached audiences in the hundreds of millions and contributed to measurable shifts in stated attitudes toward wildlife consumption.

Surveys conducted in China by WildAid and other organisations between 2015 and 2022 recorded increases in the proportion of respondents who said they would refuse to purchase pangolin products, and decreases in the proportion who reported purchasing them in the previous twelve months. These self-reported changes cannot be attributed to any single intervention, and self-reported behaviour is an imperfect proxy for actual purchasing decisions, but the directional trend is consistent across multiple independent surveys.

The Persistent Challenges

Demand reduction is slow work. Consumer belief systems shaped over many generations do not shift in response to a single campaign season. The prestige dimension of pangolin consumption — whereby rarity has inflated the social value of the product — is particularly resistant to conventional messaging strategies, because higher prices and tighter restrictions can paradoxically increase the appeal of a product to status-conscious consumers. Programmes that engage gift-givers, not only end consumers, and that address the social contexts in which pangolin products are exchanged, are more likely to be effective than those focused solely on individual health decisions.

There is also a risk of displacement: reducing demand for one pangolin-derived product without addressing the broader cultural framework that endorses wildlife medicine may simply redirect purchasing toward other endangered species. Effective demand reduction programmes therefore aim to shift the underlying norm — that wild animals are appropriate sources of medicine — rather than targeting pangolins in isolation.

Cultural Shifts Needed for Lasting Change

Lasting reduction in pangolin traditional medicine demand in Asia will require more than awareness campaigns or regulatory edicts. It requires a cultural renegotiation of what counts as credible medicine within TCM and Vietnamese traditional medicine communities. There are signs that this renegotiation is already underway. A growing cohort of TCM practitioners, many of them university-trained and integrated into China's formal healthcare system, are themselves calling for a stricter application of evidence-based criteria to the ingredients their profession uses. These voices represent the most powerful possible agents of change, because they speak with the authority of the tradition itself.

Younger urban consumers in China and Vietnam increasingly identify as environmentally conscious, and surveys suggest that awareness of pangolin endangerment is higher in these demographics than among older rural consumers. Translating that awareness into a change in gifting practices and household purchasing decisions is the next challenge for demand reduction programmes operating in these markets.

The 2020 pharmacopoeia decision in China was made in part because sustained, respectful engagement with policymakers and practitioners within the TCM system had created the conditions for institutional change. It is a model that advocates are seeking to replicate in Vietnam and in other countries where traditional medicine intersects with demand for pangolin products.

Conclusion

The demand for pangolin scales in traditional medicine across Asia is the product of deep cultural history, not simple greed or ignorance. That history commands respect, even as the scientific evidence demands that the specific practice of using pangolin-derived ingredients be abandoned. The gap between historical use and scientific evidence is clear and consistent: pangolin scales TCM preparations have no proven medical benefit that cannot be obtained from safer, more abundant and legally sourced alternatives. The challenge now is to communicate that reality in ways that are credible, culturally sensitive and ultimately persuasive to the consumers, practitioners and policymakers whose decisions will determine whether pangolins survive the twenty-first century.

To learn more about the mechanics of the pangolin trade and the conservation responses being mounted across Africa and Asia, explore the AlphaPanga blog or read our detailed article on the pangolin scale trade supply chain.