The shop is dark and deserted. Though the door is open, there is clearly no expectation of any customers walking in off the street. Visits are likely by appointment and from a specific clientele. This shop is part of an organised crime network. What is being sold is highly illegal and incredibly unethical.
Anyone wandering in would see large bags of specialist tea, local coffee, trinkets and cigarettes on the shelves. But the photographs of wild animals adorning the walls offer a clue to what is truly for sale here.
Upstairs, glass cases fill a large room and, inside there are products banned in every country in the world.
Some are instantly recognisable, such as the bracelets and chopsticks made from shiny creamy-white ivory, and a small, complete crocodile hide hanging from the wall next to a row of reptile-skin belts.
Others are less easy to discern: large bones, powdered items, a glass tank of liquid and a skeleton of a medium-sized mammal.
Perhaps the most egregious products here are the serving bowls filled with something resembling leaves or shells. These are pangolin scales – a product driving the world’s most-trafficked mammal to the edge of extinction.
This shop is only one of the businesses the Guardian gained access to while investigating the illegal wildlife trade in Laos, a landlocked country in south-east Asia.
In another, which appeared to be a cigarette shop, the Guardian found a large section of a pangolin tail sitting on a shelf alongside jars of snakes suspended in fluid.
Many of them were traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) shops, selling a mixture of legal and illegal products, while others were disguised as cultural centres for Chinese tourists, often heavily guarded, with sturdy electric gates and CCTV.
Videos on Chinese social media sites, which have been popping up more frequently in recent years, show tourists showing off their purchases of illegal products in Laos and even eating pangolin meat.
More than 1 million pangolins have been poached in the past decade – more than rhinos, elephants and tigers combined. This is largely for their scales, which are prized in TCM, and for their meat, which is eaten as a status symbol.
These unique creatures, anteaters native to parts of Asia and Africa, are the only mammals to be exclusively covered in keratin scales. They have no teeth and, when threatened, curl into a ball to protect against predators, making them easy for humans to capture. Conservationists estimate one is poached every three minutes, leading to some pangolin species being critically endangered.
Meanwhile, though their numbers are dwindling in the wild, Jeremy Phan, the director of the Lao Conservation Trust for Wildlife, a rescue centre, says pangolins are popping up in the middle of Vientiane, the capital city, many miles from their natural habitat.
He says it was “very unusual” two years ago to find a pangolin in the city, “whereas recently we’ve been getting more and more”.
His team rescued a three-week-old pangolin that had been for sale in a restaurant in Vientiane. Its mother was almost certainly killed in the illegal wildlife trade. The team rescued the infant pangolin on the way home from another rescue, and only hours after two pangolins were picked up elsewhere.
It is one of the signs many organisations are seeing of an increase in the illegal trade, brought on by a boom in Chinese tourists heading to Laos.
These trips are being facilitated by China’s belt and road initiative, an enormous infrastructure investment designed to connect the country with others around the world, through rail, highways, ports, power plants and pipelines. It has been labelled the “new silk road”, which China purports to be for economic, political and cultural cooperation.
The Laos-China railway, completed in 2021, stretches more than 600 miles (965km) from Kunming, China, through to Vientiane, and has carried more than 73 million passengers since opening. The trains have made it possible to travel quickly and cheaply between the two countries, opening up Laos as an appealing destination for Chinese tourists and leading to a surge in low-budget tour groups propping up the illegal trade.
Brother Nut, a Chinese activist and performance artist who went undercover on one of the tours as part of an art project, shared footage with the Guardian that he gathered while being taken to a shop that appeared to sell rice noodles.
“In reality, it was selling all kinds of parts from endangered animals, such as rhino horn, bear bile and pangolin,” he says.
His footage, filmed with a hidden camera, shows stalls featuring whole dead pangolins and many bowls of scales, with the salespeople claiming medicinal benefits such as curing cancer and reducing inflammation. There is no scientific evidence pangolin helps in the treatment of any medical condition.
Also being sold were tiger bones, banned globally under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (Cites), the same agreement that prohibits the sale of pangolin body parts anywhere in the world.
Brother Nut describes how tourists, many of them older, retired people, were in some cases coerced and pressured into buying illegal products, after paying as little as 100 yuan (£11) for a four-night trip. His suspicion is that tour operators are able to price the trips so low because they are expecting to profit in other ways – for example, from spending in shops and “cultural centres” that are fronts for the illegal wildlife trade.
“During the tour there were two times when the guide forced the gates [of the store] shut, and we did feel a bit scared,” he says. Undercover footage Brother Nut gathered shows tour leaders telling the visitors that these products are legal in Laos – which is untrue – and that it is their responsibility as visitors to buy products to help the struggling Laos economy.
“Actually, none of the money went to local Lao people,” Brother Nut says. “All the payments were made through WeChat Pay or Alipay, and the money ended up in the hands of the people running the scam.”
He estimates his group spent about 100,000 yuan in total – more than £11,000 – at these businesses.
Meanwhile, although Phan has been able to release one of the rescued pangolins back into the wild, both humans and animals continue to be targeted by criminal networks profiting from pushing vulnerable species to the brink of extinction.
Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow the biodiversity reporters Rebecca Ratcliffe, Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield in the Guardian app for more nature coverage.
