Princely hunt
Shikar centuries
Mughal and colonial hunts cut numbers before anyone ran a camera grid.
The tiger did not enter English as a finished emblem. Hunts, films, listings and field stations rewrote the animal on a dated clock.
This chapter keeps ten timeline points, five eras and three milestones so a later translation can hold the same years.
Where it began
Pleistocene PantheraSouth and East Asian forests
Timeline
c. 2 MaPanthera in Asia
Pleistocene fossils already show large striped cats on the continent they still occupy.
1936Hailey / Corbett park
United Provinces reserve that later became Jim Corbett National Park.
1944Man-Eaters of Kumaon
Corbett book that fixed the man-eater as an English-language type.
1973Project Tiger
Indira Gandhi-era launch after a crisis count -- the policy that still structures India tigers.
1986Ranthambore tourism boom
A reserve became a global viewing economy; later tigress identities (Machli) followed.
2010St Petersburg Tx2
Range states pledged a doubling by 2022.
2014India camera-trap census
All-India estimate used cameras more systematically -- a method break from pugmarks.
2018India count rise
Official figures passed 2,200 -- celebrated, then debated for method.
2022Tx2 deadline
Global double did not arrive uniformly; India claimed success, SE Asia did not.
2023Malayan and Indochinese losses
Range-country reports kept mainland SE Asia on the wrong slope.
The eras
1936-73
First parks then crisis
Corbett-era reserves did not prevent a 1960s-70s crash.
1973-2010
Project Tiger state
India built a reserve bureaucracy other range states only partly copied.
2010-22
Tx2 slogan years
A doubling pledge met camera maths and uneven politics.
2020s
India vs the rest
One country holds most wild tigers; the map is not a species recovery.
Milestones
Project Tiger
1973A national project, not a charity poster, became the tiger state.
Tx2 pledge
2010A diplomatic number that 2022 only partly honoured.
Camera-trap census
2014-Method change that made later rises hard to compare with pugmark decades.
Reading tiger history beside the resilience score keeps a recovered stock from standing in for a threatened cousin.
Keep exploring
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