Blood Timber

An elite unit of Thai park rangers is fighting heavily armed loggers to save the world’s most valuable tree

- Philip Sherwell

THE PHOTOS were dark and grainy, but Kasidis Chanpradub, a senior officer with an elite paramilitary unit of the Thai park rangers, knew what he was looking at. “They are poachers, for sure,” he told Newsweek. “Nobody else would be out there at that time of night.”

After a morning briefing at the rangers’ offices in a remote corner of Thailand’s Khao Yai National Park, Chanpradub deployed five men dressed in camouflage and combat boots. Armed with assault rifles, they fanned out beneath the thick jungle canopy, looking for poachers. The area they protect is vast—2,375 square miles of forest across five national parks in eastern Thailand, which UNESCO has declared a World Heritage site. More than 800 species live here, including endangered animals such as the Asian tiger and Siamese crocodile.

These days, however, most poachers here aren’t after rare animals. They are hunting what has quietly become the world’s most valuable trafficked wildlife product: the Siamese rosewood tree. Seizures by customs officials of rosewood are worth twice that of the second most valuable item, elephant tusks, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime. And over the past decade, poachers have chainsawed the trees into near extinction, threatening the ecosystem of Khao Yai, a popular tourist destination.

The booming demand is from China, where ornately carved, Ming imperial-style furniture known as hongmu is now a $5 billion industry, according to a 2014 estimate by the Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA), a London-based nongovernmental organization that monitors illegal wildlife trafficking. That industry relies heavily on the rosewood trees chopped down across the Mekong region in Cambodia, Laos, Vietnam and Thailand.