Traditional Chinese Medicine

(TCM) is over 5,000 years old

and treated 962 million patients

in 2016 alone. TCM clinics and

treatments make up 15.8% of all

medical services provided in

China to this day. The use of pangolins in TCM is not a new development as it can be dated back to 480 AD. Even prescriptions containing pangolin scales were documented in the Bencao jing jizhu, an ancient pharmaceutical compendium. This text was later cited in the Compendium of Materia Medica which is a Chinese herbology volume written in 1578 that lists all known medicine at the time (Wang et al., 2020). The Compendium of Materia Medica is the most comprehensive Chinese traditional medicine book ever written. The mention of pangolins within this book greatly explains the acceptance of their use within Chinese healthcare.