Why are there so many stories about "killing tigers"? Were there many tigers in ancient times?

This answer is included in the excellent answer "The Year of the Tiger doesn't scare you"

"You can't be scared in the Year of the Tiger, but the Spring Festival will be fun." Go and have a look.

In ancient China, almost as long as we talked about heroes, we always used a story to prove it. Only in this way can the hero's name be worthy of the name. For example, Li Guang, a famous flying general in the Western Han Dynasty, knew that tigers were rampant in Beiping, and he personally killed them with his entourage. Once, on the road with his entourage, he suddenly found a tiger deep in the jungle and shot it with an arrow. As an archer, Li Guang naturally hit the target, and this time is no exception. However, when the followers walked in, they found that it was not a tiger, but a stone shaped and colored like a tiger. But to everyone's surprise, although it was a "Shi Hu", General Li's arrow still hit, and it was deeply embedded in the stone. Li Guang himself felt incredible, and even shot a few arrows specially. As a result, all the stones he met were full of sparks, but they never shot into the stones.

In the famous "Water Margin", there is also a story that Wu Erlang killed a tiger in Jingyanggang. Although the story of killing tigers is fabricated, the prototype of this story comes from the story of Wu Walker recorded in the Southern Song Dynasty's "Drunken Man's sake is not wine", and also tells the story of how a hero named Wu killed tigers by killing people.

The ancients always beat tigers. Were there many tigers in ancient times? As we all know, there are tigers in China today, only in the northeast. It was once said that the South China Tiger was photographed, but it was later confirmed that the photo was false. China was sparsely populated in ancient times, so many places were sparsely populated, and tigers were recorded in many places.

For example, in Sizhou, today's Jiangsu Province, a tiger was captured alive and the local government paid tribute to Song Taizu. To test how fierce the tiger is, Song Taizu put a sheep in it. Without saying anything, the tiger jumped up, bit off the sheep's head, and then tore at the sheep's body, eating meat and drinking blood, which was cruel and bloodthirsty. Especially this tiger's eyes, when staring at people, the catalogue is so fierce that people dare not look straight.

Nowadays, everyone who has been to Suzhou knows a place called Tiger Hill. According to local chronicles, a tiger suddenly appeared in Suzhou in September of the second year of the Northern Song Dynasty, that is, at the end of Song Taizong, and ate several people in a row at night. The local official organized hunters to kill the man-eating tiger, but it didn't work.

Biography of Martyrs in the History of Song Dynasty records a touching story that happened in Qingyuan Prefecture, which is Ningbo, Zhejiang Province today. In the early years of Southern Song Dynasty, there was a woman named Tong Ba Na who was on the road with her mother. Suddenly, a tiger jumped out of the jungle and left with Tongbana's mother in his mouth. Tongbana is pulling the tiger's tail to prevent the tiger from taking his mother away. So the tiger put down his mother, picked up his mother and left. After the local government knew about it, in order to commemorate this filial daughter who gave her life for her mother, a ancestral temple was built where she was taken away by the tiger for people to remember.

At the end of the Ming Dynasty, Zhang ravaged Sichuan and many people died. So in Chengdu, people can see tigers moving in the city in broad daylight. A scholar who escaped the disaster also saw six white tigers walking by the river opposite the moat in broad daylight. It can be seen that because of the war and famine, the tiger disaster has reached such a point.

Tigers are at the top of the mammalian food chain. According to the latest research, the range of an annual tiger is 50 square kilometers. So there were so many tigers in ancient times, which also showed how extensive the forest vegetation was at that time. Nowadays, with the increase of human population, the range of human activities has become larger, and at the same time, human weapons have become more powerful. If you want to see tigers now, I'm afraid you can only go to the zoo.