Hong Kong (CNN)In 1929, two Chinese farmers were stopped by a British police officer while ambling down a road in a rugged part of Hong Kong's then-expansive rural hinterland.

They weren't committing a crime: they were carrying a caged tiger.

"As it is quite unusual to see a live tiger carried about in the New Territories the police officer was curious to know where it came from," said a front-page report in the Hong Kong Telegraph on October 28 that year.

Two days earlier, the men realized a deer trap they had set 400 yards (365 meters) from their village had gone missing. They followed tracks etched in the dirt where it had been dragged to a pit -- inside, they discovered a wounded tiger, the jaws of the metal snare biting into its leg.