From an old cardboard box, Li Wen drew a clear glass bottle filled with a dark brown liquid. The yellowed label indicated that it was brewed decades ago.

“I have newer batches too,” Li said in a voice stained by caffeine and nicotine, “and I’m also making my own.” Several steps away, like a stage magician, he lifted a black cloth for the grand reveal: a glass carboy, about five gallons in volume, filled nearly to the brim with a spirit that was lighter in shade than the aged elixirs on display. At the bottom was unmistakably a bone. “Tiger, too, of course.”

Li has a small collection of tiger bone wine. His hobby of buying and selling the stuff led him to experiment with tincturing. His recipe for the spirit is simple: add a tiger bone to rice wine, steep for 50 days. The traditional process is much more complex: tiger bones were also brewed with a multitude of other ingredients like antelope horn, red sage, and dried ginger.

Tigers have it rough in China. In 1959, as part of the Great Leap Forward, Mao Zedong waged a public campaign in an attempt to eradicate the South China Tiger, as he considered the species “an enemy of man.” More recently, at a CITES meeting held in Geneva—CITES stands for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora—a Chinese delegate said, “We don’t ban trade in tiger skins but we do ban trade in tiger bones.” It was the first time that a Chinese public official acknowledged the existence of the tiger pelt trade within the country. The official ban on tiger bone sales has been in place since 1993—but why does the Chinese government see a difference between killing endangered animals for their skins and killing them for their bones?