The reserve was stitched together in 2002 from seventeen defunct sheep farms near Philippolis, in the Free State. Decades of overgrazing had stripped the land to bare soil and scrub. The word 'laohu' means tiger in Mandarin, and the name was the first signal that something unusual was planned for this exhausted landscape.

Wildlife conservationist Li Quan conceived the project. She initially enlisted South African wildlife filmmaker John Varty and his brother Dave, an eco-tourism developer, to help with the rehabilitation effort. The partnership collapsed in acrimony when Li Quan and her husband, investment banker Stuart Bray, raised concerns that the Vartys were misusing project funds. The Vartys acknowledged borrowing money and pulled out in October 2002, just weeks before Chinese authorities were prepared to sign a formal agreement recognizing the project's conservation value. Li Quan and Bray pressed on alone.

The South China tiger is one of the most critically endangered large cats on Earth. By the end of 2015, Laohu Valley held twenty individuals - roughly a fifth of the world's remaining population of this subspecies. The tigers are confined to a camp complex of about 1.8 square kilometers, ringed by tiger-proof fencing, while the rest of the 378-square-kilometer reserve protects native South African species.

The reserve's tiger population has weathered setbacks. One of two cubs born in late 2015 died in February 2016. But that same year brought a recovery: six healthy cubs arrived, born to three mothers - Madonna, Cathay, and Princess. Three of Madonna's cubs were named Hunter, Ivan, and Jay. The names read like a suburban neighborhood, but the animals they belong to are anything but domestic. These cubs learned to stalk and bring down prey on the open veld, acquiring skills that no zoo could teach.

The tigers are the headline act, but Laohu Valley's most historically significant moment may belong to a different cat entirely. In 2013, working with the Endangered Wildlife Trust, the reserve received two male South African cheetahs from Amakhala Game Reserve. It was the first time wild cheetahs had set foot in the Free State after more than a century of regional extinction.

An adult female followed in early 2016, and in February 2017, three wild cheetah cubs were born on the reserve - the first cheetahs born in the wild in the Free State since the species vanished from the province over a hundred years earlier. The reserve had quietly achieved something remarkable: not just holding endangered animals in enclosures, but restoring a predator to a landscape that had forgotten what it meant to have one.

The reserve spans the border between the Free State and the Northern Cape, straddling the Orange River and the upper reaches of the Vanderkloof Dam. The northern section covers 232 square kilometers of flat grassland; the southern section adds 146 square kilometers of Karoo dolerite hills covered in karroid shrubs. Dense stands of Acacia karroo woodland line the Orange River's banks.

The climate is harsh. Annual rainfall averages just 400 millimeters, mostly arriving as thunderstorms between January and April. Summer days are hot; winter brings frost and occasional snow. In this unlikely setting, the reserve now shelters African wild dogs, lions, leopards, spotted hyenas, caracals, and bat-eared foxes alongside the reintroduced cheetahs and the captive tigers. Plains zebras, gemsboks, elands, and wildebeest roam the open areas. The land that seventeen sheep farms nearly destroyed is slowly remembering what it was before the fences went up.