through history, but one scholar estimated that tigers have killed
approximately a million Asians over the last four hundred years.^4 The
majority of these deaths occurred in India, but heavy losses were suffered
across East Asia.
Throughout Korea, Manchuria, and southeast China, tigers were
considered both sacred and a scourge. Until around 1930, tigers continued
to pose such a risk that, in North Korea, the bulk of offerings made to
some Buddhist shrines were prayers for protection from these animals.
Nonetheless, tigers were held in high esteem in part because it was
believed that they, too, made offerings to heaven. In the tigers’ case,
these gifts took the form of the severed heads of their prey, a
determination made, presumably, by the beheaded state of many tiger
kills. Ordinary people were reluctant to retaliate against a predatory tiger
for fear it would take offense, not to mention revenge, and so their day-
to-day lives were shaped—and sometimes tyrannized—by efforts to at
once avoid and propitiate these marauding gods.
According to Dale Miquelle, the American tiger researcher, the
relatively low incidence of tiger attacks in Russia as compared to Korea
at the turn of the last century, or in the Sundarbans today, is due to
learning: “When the majority of people have no means of defense (i.e.,
firearms) tigers figure that out and include them on the list of potential
prey,” he explained.^5 “However, where you have a heavily armed
populace (e.g., Russia) tigers also figure that out and ‘take people off the
list.’ The implication is that you have to teach tigers that people are
dangerous. I think this holds for most large carnivores.”
This logic holds up in many places, but in Primorye, the Udeghe and
Nanai experience apparently defies it. Despite the fact that they made
their home in a landscape regularly patrolled by tigers, there is no record
—anecdotal or otherwise—of tiger attacks on a scale with their Chinese
and Korean neighbors. Further south, along the China coast, tiger attacks
and man-eating were common, and this combination of hazard and
reverence made for some strange cultural collisions. In 1899, a tiger
hunting missionary named Harry Caldwell relocated to Fujian province