Authorities in Wuhan, the epicentre of the coronavirus outbreak, have officially banned eating, hunting and breeding wild animals.
A notice on the city's municipal Government website said the ban will come into immediate effect on Wednesday and will last for five years.
Cases of the new coronavirus were first recorded in the city late last year, and linked to a seafood market that included a live animal section.
Most hunting of wild animals has been banned within the city limits and Wuhan has been decared "a wildlife sanctuary".
Hunting is banned except for "scientific research, population regulation, monitoring of epidemic diseases and other special circumstances," the notice says.
"Hunting of wild animals is strictly prohibited," the statement says. "The administrative area of the whole city is a wildlife sanctuary."
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There will also be strict new controls on the breeding of wild animals, with city officials making it clear that none can be reared as food.
"It is prohibited to artificially breed terrestrial wild animals and rare and endangered aquatic wild animals under national key protection for the purpose of eating," the notice says.
The notice also says illegal wildlife trading is "comprehensively prohibited" and there will be strengthening of "the supervision and inspection of wild animals".
Officials will also "actively carry out wildlife protection and public health safety publicity and education, eliminate the abuse of wild animals, promote a civilised and healthy, green and environmentally friendly lifestyle, and create a good atmosphere for people and nature to live in harmony".
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The move comes amid mounting pressure for China to crack down on the illegal wildlife trade blamed by many for the Covid-19 pandemic.
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The coronavirus is widely believed to have passed from bats to people, possibly via another species, before spreading across the globe.
In February, researchers analysed samples from seven patients with severe pneumonia, six of whom were identified as workers from the seafood market in Wuhan.
They found that full-length genome sequences – which determined the DNA of the virus – from five of the patients, were almost (over 99.9 per cent) identical to each other.
According to the study published in Nature, the virus sequence is 96 per cent identical at the whole-genome level to a bat coronavirus, suggesting bats are a probable source of the new coronavirus.
Other studies suggested the Covid-19 outbreak may have been sparked by stray dogs eating bat meat.
After analysing coronavirus across different species, a top biology researcher in Canada concluded that feral dogs may have helped transmit the new Sars-CoV-2 disease to humans.
The ancestor of the virus and its nearest relative, a bat coronavirus, could have infected the intestines of canines where it evolved before jumping to humans, Professor Xuhua Xia’s study suggests.
Wuhan, the original epicentre of China's coronavirus outbreak, conducted 856,128 tests for the disease on Tuesday, the local health authority said on Wednesday, compared with 467,847 a day earlier.
