Originally published 2020-02-15.
The Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was closed on 1 January 2020, after doctors linked many of the city's first cases of a new pneumonia to people who worked or shopped there. Within weeks, photos of a price list from one stall spread around the world, claiming the market sold more than 100 kinds of animals, from wolf pups and peacocks to snakes, porcupines and even live koalas. Some of that was true: the market did sell live wild animals, including raccoon dogs and civets. Some was not: the koala claim was a mistranslation. And the question everyone was asking, whether the virus began there, is still debated today.
Here is what is known about the market, what it really sold, why wildlife trade worries virologists, and what the evidence says about the market's role in the COVID-19 pandemic.
What kind of place the Huanan market was
Despite its name, Huanan was much more than a fish market. Opened in 2002 in Wuhan's Jianghan district, it covered more than 50,000 square metres and had over 1,000 tenants, and it was described as the largest seafood wholesale market in central China. Most stalls sold fish, shellfish, poultry and pork. A smaller western section sold live animals and game.
Markets like this are often called "wet markets" because floors are hosed down constantly and fresh produce, meat and live animals are sold side by side. Most wet markets in China and across Asia sell ordinary food and pose little unusual risk. The concern is with the minority of stalls that keep live wild mammals in crowded cages, close to each other and to people.
The viral price list, and what it got wrong
The list that went viral in January 2020 came from a single stall and was shared on Chinese social media. It priced dozens of animals, including wolf pups, civets, crocodile parts, giant salamanders, snakes, rats and porcupines. Journalist Muyi Xiao posted photos of the menu and pointed out that, after the outbreak was discovered, the same storefront had covered the character for "wild" in its name.
Photo from Douban of a menu at #Wuhan Huanan Seafood Market. Don't know when it was taken, but they sell all kinds of wild animals incl. live wolf pups & palm civets. 2nd photo taken after outbreak discovered shows this storefront (3rd left) covering word “野 (wild)” in its name. pic.twitter.com/HiQlzX4XBX
— Muyi Xiao (@muyixiao) January 21, 2020
(This post is no longer available on X.)
Nobody knows exactly when the menu was photographed, and it was never checked against the stall's actual stock. The most eye-catching item turned out to be wrong. The list mentioned a "tree bear", which English-language posts translated as "koala". In fact the term referred to a large rodent, and there is no evidence that koalas, an Australian marsupial protected for export, were ever sold there.
Other posts at the time mixed real images with photos from other places and years, sometimes with angry or mocking captions about Chinese eating habits. Several of those posts have since been deleted.
新年快樂😁
— 😷Liberty😷 (@Hongkong3333333) January 22, 2020
要死吃多點吧！ pic.twitter.com/r06hwwMm1f
(This post is no longer available on X.)
What was actually on sale
The best evidence comes not from viral posts but from a study published in Scientific Reports in 2021. Researchers who had been surveying Wuhan's markets for an unrelated tick-borne disease project recorded sales from May 2017 to November 2019. They counted 38 wild species sold across the city's markets, 31 of them protected under Chinese law. Raccoon dogs, badgers, hedgehogs, civets, bamboo rats and others appeared regularly, often alive and in poor conditions.
Two animals that many people assumed were sold were missing: the survey found no pangolins and no bats. That matters because bats were widely blamed online, often with photos of bat dishes that had nothing to do with Wuhan.
For years Chinese officials denied that live wild animals were traded at Huanan. That position only changed in mid-2021.
这东西长得像不像死神躺在你碗里？之前看纪录片，蝙蝠生活在山洞里，就地排泄，山洞里积了厚厚一层粪便，粪便里生活着各种恶心的虫子…经历这次事件能让中国人彻底放弃吃野味吗？ pic.twitter.com/6mNQmBWCpi
— 陈秋实（陳秋實） (@chenqiushi404) January 22, 2020
Why live wildlife trade worries scientists
Most new human infections come from animals. When different species are packed together, stressed and slaughtered on site, viruses get more chances to jump between animals and then into people. Markets selling live wild mammals bring together exactly the species, such as civets and raccoon dogs, that can carry coronaviruses related to those found in bats.
The clearest precedent is SARS. The 2002–2004 outbreak began in Guangdong province in late 2002. Masked palm civets sold for food carried closely related viruses, and horseshoe bats were later identified as the likely natural reservoir. SARS infected about 8,400 people worldwide, killing roughly one in ten, before it was contained in 2003. China tightened some wildlife rules afterwards, but conservationists said the system remained full of loopholes, especially for species bred on farms for commercial sale.
Did COVID-19 start at the market?
This is the hardest question, and the honest answer is that it is not settled.
The evidence pointing to the market is substantial. Many of the earliest known cases were linked to it, and early cases clustered around it geographically. When China's CDC swabbed surfaces in January 2020, 33 of 585 samples tested positive for the virus, and 31 of those came from the western wildlife area. In 2023, an international team analysing genetic data from those swabs found SARS-CoV-2 together with genetic material from raccoon dogs, often in the same samples from the same stall. Two papers in Science in 2022 argued that the pandemic most likely began at the market.
There are also gaps. The animals had been removed before officials arrived, so none were ever tested. The earliest known patient, who fell ill on 1 December 2019, had no known link to the market, and 13 of the first 41 hospitalised patients had no market exposure either. A WHO-led mission in early 2021 concluded that spread between people at the market was likely but that the original source remained unknown. Some scientists and several governments consider an accidental leak from a Wuhan laboratory to be possible, and Chinese researchers have suggested that infected people, not animals, brought the virus into the market.
Put simply: the market was very likely an early amplifier of the outbreak, and an animal spillover there is a leading hypothesis, but it has not been proven beyond dispute.
What changed after the outbreak
Wuhan banned the sale of wild-animal products on 22 January 2020. On 24 February 2020 China's top legislature banned the trade and eating of most terrestrial wild animals nationwide, a much broader step than anything taken after SARS. The ban has exceptions, notably for animals used in traditional Chinese medicine, and enforcement has been uneven.
The virus itself did not wait for policy. By late January 2020 cases were already appearing outside China, and health authorities as far away as Australia were isolating travellers with symptoms while they waited for test results.
#WuhanSARS 中國人咁食野味， 滅族不遠已 pic.twitter.com/yW0Ja6plIp
— chunglinpeng (@Fightin49203206) January 23, 2020
(This post is no longer available on X.)
How to read stories like this
The Huanan story shows how quickly real facts and rumours get mixed. A genuine problem, the sale of live wild animals in crowded conditions, became attached to an invented detail like live koalas and to posts mocking a whole nation. Scientists' careful language about "likely" origins was turned into certainty by one side and dismissed by the other.
When you see a viral claim about an outbreak, it helps to ask where an image came from, when it was taken, and whether anyone has checked it against records. The useful lesson from Wuhan is not that one culture eats strange food. It is that trading stressed wild animals alongside people is risky anywhere, and that better rules, surveillance and transparency make the next spillover less likely.
Sources: Wikipedia: Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market; Wikipedia: Severe acute respiratory syndrome. Early reporting by Mothership, Business Insider and AFP via The Straits Times.
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