The gruesome photo from Kenya began circulating in early February: A lion’s severed head lay in the grass, his once-golden mane faded to ash. A single paw rested nearby.

To most, it was just another image from Kenya’s Maasai Mara wildlife reserve. But to a tight-knit group of wildlife fans in China, it was unmistakable. This was Lorkulup — a lion they had tracked obsessively online for more than a year.

One of them, Zhang Bibo, was at an airport when someone posted the photo in a fan group. He remembers running into a locker room, crouching over, and crying as puzzled strangers walked by.

“I didn’t care. I couldn’t stop,” says the 29-year-old from the southern island province of Hainan, who had never seen the lion in person. “It was devastating.”

For years, Zhang — like hundreds of others across China — spent hours each day combing through safari footage, livestreams, and tourist videos, searching for glimpses of Lorkulup’s pride. 

In screenshots passed between group chats, they studied his every move: how he hunted buffalo, the way he trailed behind his cubs, the idiosyncratic way he drank water.

“I’ve been crying nonstop,” says Liao Cao, a fan in her 20s from the northern Hebei province who spoke to Sixth Tone using a pseudonym. “It feels like losing an old friend who’s been with you for so long.” 

Kenya’s wildlife authorities called it a fatal hunt. Lorkulup, they said, was found beside an eland carcass, likely gored during the kill and scavenged by hyenas.

But to fans in China, the explanation felt incomplete.

In the final photo of Lorkulup, his head appeared to be severed cleanly from the spine — a detail they believed pointed not to scavenging, but to human violence. 

In private forums, some fans speculated Lorkulup had been run over by a Land Cruiser, then killed with spears and machetes. Others pointed to signs of skinning on his paw, or rumors that his remains had been scattered to hide the evidence. 

As fans traded theories online, grief began hardening into action. Some contacted Kenyan officials. Others explored legal options or even tried to hire private investigators in Kenya. A few went as far as offering rangers money for better protection.

Within weeks, they had pooled thousands of yuan for billboard tributes in New York’s Times Square and London’s Westfield mall in Stratford. One fan diverted money saved for a lawsuit. Another flew across continents with four kilograms of brochures. They even flooded Google Maps reviews of the Maasai Mara with pleas for protection.

In China, the pattern looked strikingly familiar — the kind of obsessive devotion once mostly reserved for its native giant pandas. Just this time, the focus was a savanna thousands of kilometers away, a lion many had never seen, and a death they couldn’t explain.

Finding Quan Quan

In Swahili, “Lorkulup” means runny nose — a nod to the small hole in his upper jaw left by a spear that gave him a near-constant nasal drip.

But to his Chinese fans, he was Quan Quan, short for xiangquan, or radio collar. The name stuck after a documentary crew tagged him with a GPS tracker. Of the five lions in his coalition, known as the Black Rock Boys, Lorkulup, the gentlest, was the least likely to lose his collar in a fight. 

Most fans stumbled upon the pride by accident, via a tourist video, a documentary segment, a lion staring straight into the camera. Something about their gaze held them. 

From there, keeping track of the Black Rock Boys became a habit. Fans learned their long and complex Swahili names and could identify individuals within seconds just by movement: the sway of a mane, the contours of a face, the rhythm of a limp. They began following every hunt, every mating, every territorial clash.

To his fans, Lorkulup stood out among the Black Rock Boys for his gentleness, his patience, and the way he stayed close to his family.

The injury in his upper jaw made drinking difficult. He had to plunge his whole face into puddles, soaking his mane each time. It gave him a disheveled look that fans could spot instantly.

“He was nothing like a stereotypical lion,” explains Liao. “He wasn’t that domineering, kingly, handsome figure. Nor was he just sleeping under trees while the lionesses did the hunting. He was more like a gentle husband, or a really sweet dad.”

He was once seen lying quietly beside a nomadic male lion who had wandered into his territory — a move most dominant males would never allow. 

According to several fans Sixth Tone interviewed, he was also known for taking down buffalo, something few lions attempt alone. 

Liao remembered one video in particular. Lorkulup was still recovering from spear wounds when he brought down a buffalo. Instead of feeding, he dragged the carcass nearly a kilometer back to his pride so they could eat first.

“I wasn’t that attached to him at the time,” recalls Liao. “But I was so stunned. That wasn’t how a lion behaves. It was how a decent, honest man would act.”

Still, lion fandom remains a niche community in China. One of the biggest lion forums on Tieba, a Reddit-style message board, has just over 10,000 members. On Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, lion-focused accounts often have only a few thousand followers. Even the busiest WeChat groups rarely exceed 300.

“Pandas are national treasures. Each one has dozens of aunties and uncles watching out for them,” says Yunyun, a lion fan in her 20s from the southern Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “But lions don’t have that kind of support.” 

That difference made his death feel harder to process.

“He was such a good lion,” Zhang adds, his voice trembling. “He didn’t deserve a life that was marked by pain from beginning to end.”

Breaking point

Among Chinese lion fans, the Lunar New Year has come to mean bad news: In 2023, Lorkulup was speared and barely survived. In 2024, his brother Olobor disappeared. Almost exactly one year later, Lorkulup was found dead beside an eland carcass.

The news hit harder than anyone expected. Liao began saving every clip of Lorkulup she could find. Before this, she only saved moments that made her smile. “Because there was always a tomorrow,” she says. “Now there isn’t.”

In one WeChat group, fans said they couldn’t do it again. The group had formed the year before, after Olobor disappeared. Now, just 12 months later, they were mourning another loss.

“They chose to kill him on that exact date. It feels like revenge,” says Dian Bao’er, a teacher in her 20s from the eastern Shandong province, who had finished a tribute video for Olobor’s anniversary just days before news of Lorkulup’s death began circulating online.

Others also felt the timing was too precise to be coincidence.

Fans had imagined a different kind of ending — Lorkulup growing old, losing his rank, drifting to the edge of the pride.

“That’s nature,” says Liao. “We were ready for whatever the wild brought. We would have accepted it. But human violence is something we cannot accept.”

Twenty-year-old Du She, who lives in Tokyo, was among the few voices in fan groups still holding on to hope. She had only discovered the lions in mid-2024 — after Olobor disappeared — and hadn’t lived through that first loss.

“Whether we speak up or not, animals are still being harmed,” she wrote again and again, in group chats and on the lifestyle platform Xiaohongshu, known in English as RedNote. 

“But only when we do speak up is there even a chance things might change. Now that we’re united, and with newer fans like me joining in, maybe there’s still hope.”

It wasn’t much. But it was a start. And the ones who stayed began to act — slowly, but with purpose.

Yunyun and her friends left comments wherever they could — under posts by the Kenya Wildlife Service, on Chinese travel ads for Kenya, even in hotel reviews from the Maasai Mara. 

They emailed lawmakers and local journalists. No one responded. One fan spoke with lawyers and private investigators in Nairobi, but none had handled anything like this before. Zhang even tried contacting the Kenyan Embassy in China. Nothing.

Some had tried a similar campaign in 2024, after Olobor disappeared. This time, they wanted to go bigger.

Though a newer member, Du stepped in to help coordinate. 

“Whether it works or not, you do it first,” she says. “Once you act, unexpected things can happen. I’m only here because someone else kept posting — photos, videos, words. I hope someone like me sees what we’re doing now, and becomes a new lion fan.”

The group chose two locations: London’s Westfield shopping center in Stratford on Feb. 15 — timed to coincide with a nearby football match — and New York’s Times Square on March 3.

A total of 182 people contributed to the London campaign, and 195 to the one in New York. Every image and line of text was debated over and over, until they got it right.

Xue’er, another lion fan from the southwestern metropolis of Chongqing, put the 24,000 yuan ($3,340) she had saved to fund a lawsuit in Kenya entirely into the Times Square projection. Another group member helped produce a press release — translated into Chinese, English, and Japanese.

Dian, who happened to be traveling to London, packed four kilograms of brochures into her suitcase — “like carrying bricks,” she said — and handed them out one by one to strangers.

“With my broken English, I explained human-lion conflict to an old lady with silver hair. She seemed thoughtful,” she recalls. “On the train, I gave a flyer to the man sitting across from me. He didn’t say anything, but he read it carefully from beginning to end. That was enough for me.”

For Du, visibility was the first step. “If we can make what happened to Quan Quan visible — if more people know — then the pressure on the authorities changes,” she said.

Xue’er agrees. “Even if just one more person walks away with a sense of what wildlife protection means, that’s already something,” she asserts. “Don’t focus on how much change you’re making. It’s not instant. It takes time.”

The hard part

In the Maasai Mara, Zhuo Qiang — one of Kenya’s best-known Chinese conservationists, known locally as “Simba,” or lion in Swahili — has had to learn patience.

Now 52, Zhuo runs the Mara Nature Center, and has spent the past decade trying to keep lions alive through tighter patrols, better enclosures, and new economic models.

A former civil servant from southwest China’s Guizhou province, Zhuo moved to Kenya in 2010 to join the rangers — the frontline patrol teams responsible for protecting wildlife in the Maasai Mara. 

After more than a decade in the region, Zhuo says he understands the heartbreak Chinese fans feel. 

“Loving lions, caring about wildlife is a good starting point,” he says. “I’m just like these lion fans. In the beginning, I came to Africa simply because I adored lions.”

But on the ground, protecting lions meant grappling with grazing rights, land politics, and communities trying to survive alongside predators. 

“(The Maasai people) admire lions, but also hate them at times,” he says. “When lions attack their cattle, they won’t hesitate to retaliate in many cases.” 

For years, Zhuo tried education campaigns. But what worked best, he says, was money. In conservancies like Ol Kinyei — Kenya’s first private conservation area — Maasai families lease their land and earn income mainly from ecotourism instead of livestock. In return, the lions stay protected.

“Before, each household earned maybe $500 a year. Now, it’s $3,700 — more than seven times as much,” he says. “So even if a lion kills a few cows, their attitude changes — because lions are their golden goose. No lions, no tourists. No tourists, no park fees. No park fees, no lease payments.”

Still, Zhuo cautions against the reaction he sees online. After Lorkulup’s death, some Chinese fans began posting harsh — and at times indiscriminate — criticism of Maasai herders and park authorities on social media. 

“Protecting lions isn’t just about following one pride or one individual,” he says. “It requires looking at lions from an ecological and conservation biology perspective — and turning more landscapes into true protected areas.”

Some fans have come to similar realizations on their own.

“In China, we lost so much of our wildlife during development,” says Dian, the teacher from Shandong. “Pandas became endangered because we destroyed their habitats. We’re still trying to make up for that. Now we just don’t want to see the same mistakes happen somewhere else.”

In the online group chats these days, many still share new sightings of Lorkulup’s brothers and cubs. Sometimes they cry when they think of him. But then a new clip surfaces — a cub growing chubbier, the pride feeding on a buffalo — and for a moment, there’s joy again.

“I thought about leaving the group,” admits Zhang. “I was tired. I couldn’t take it. But after I calmed down, I knew I shouldn’t go. I want his cubs to carry on his spirit.”

This past February, Dian traveled to the Maasai Mara for the first time. She had missed the chance to ever see Lorkulup alive. But her local guide helped her find the pride he left behind.

One afternoon, beneath an acacia tree, four cubs were resting in the grass. Dian stayed in the car, watching in silence. One of the cubs was Lorkulup’s. Another was the son of his missing brother — a cub he had helped raise.

She sat there for more than two hours. Then, quietly, she began to cry.

Editor: Apurva.

(Header image: Lorkulup in Maasai Mara, Jan. 9, 2025. Courtesy of @Alex的自然之镜 on Xiaohongshu)