When it comes to pandas, China is spot on
Whether they are black with white spots or white with black spots may be debated, but not the country’s success
The giant panda has been on the earth for around 8 million years. But the West only learned about it in 1869 thanks to a French missionary trying to convert Chinese people to Roman Catholicism.
Jean Pierre Armand David (18261900) was born in Espelette, near Bayonne in the French Pyrenees. A Vincentian priest and a naturalist with extensive knowledge in ornithology, zoology and botany, he started working in the Dengchigou Catholic Church in Baoxing, a mountainous county under Ya’an city in Southwest China’s Sichuan province in March 1869.
Soon afterward, he was invited to tea at a local hunter’s home. That’s where he first saw the skin of a giant panda. Suspecting it to be a new animal species, he had the hunter capture a live panda, made a specimen and mailed it to Musee d’Histoire Naturelle’s Henri Milne Edwards in Paris. In 1870, Edwards published a paper declaring the panda to be a new species.
The specimen, which is still kept at Musee d’Histoire Naturelle, aroused Westerners’ initial interest in the bear, which is unique to China.
According to the 2019 Annual Conference of the Chinese Committee of Giant Panda Breeding Techniques, held in November in Chengdu, Sichuan, there are more than 1,300 pandas living in the wild in the province, accounting for 75 percent of the national total. The rest are in Shaanxi and Gansu provinces.
While it is rare to spot a wild panda, it is easy to see captive ones.China has 600 captive pandas and most of them are in Sichuan.
Just 3 kilometers from Dengchigou Catholic Church is the Baoxing County Giant Panda Cultural Publicity and Education Center, which covers more than 20,000 square meters but has only two residents — Meng Xi, a 27-year-old male panda, and Chuan Xing, a 28-year-old female. Their parents live in the wild in Baoxing.
China’s fourth panda census, the results of which were released in 2015, tallied 1,864 wild pandas as of the end of 2013. Of those, 181 were in Baoxing.
Located on the western edge of the Sichuan Plain, Baoxing is an important ecological area in the upper reaches of the Yangtze River. It covers 3,114 square kilometers, 99.7 percent of which is mountainous. Three-fourths of the land is in the core area for the protection of pandas.
From 1957 to 1982, China sent 24 pandas as national gifts to nine countries, including the former Soviet Union, North Korea, the United States, Japan, France, the United Kingdom, Mexico, Spain and West Germany. Sixteen of those animals were from Baoxing, according to Ya’an Daily.
The best time to see the two cuddly bears in Baoxing is in summer, when urbanites can escape the heat and feast their eyes on natural beauty as they travel to the center in mountainous Heping village.
“If they want to put up for the night, visitors can live in a homestay cluster in David Town to watch drifting clouds over mountain peaks during the daytime, gaze at stars at night and breathe fresh air all day long,” said Li Ming, a local guide.
David Town, located near the iconic Dengchigou Catholic Church built in 1839, is named for Jean Pierre Armand David.
Also in Ya’an is the Bifengxia base of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda.
In 1980, an agreement between the World Wide Fund for Nature and the Chinese government led to the establishment of the center in Sichuan’s Wolong National Nature Reserve.
It was once difficult for captive pandas to become ruttish and mate, and for their cubs to survive. From 1992 to 2006, researchers at the center developed solutions to all three problems and managed to rescue the animals from the brink of extinction.
The center, with four bases in Sichuan, is now the world’s largest panda conservation and research organization, having built up the number of captive pandas from 10 to 312.
The center began loaning pandas to other countries and regions in 1996. These pandas have given birth to 19 cubs. Fifteen have returned to the center, said Wang Lun, an official at the 51-hectare Dujiangyan base.
Under an agreement for global giant panda preservation, pandas born overseas belong to China and must be returned after their second birthday.
One of the biggest draws for visitors are the pandas that have returned from overseas and are well-known in foreign countries. They include Hua Mei, Mei Sheng, Lin Bing, Fu Long and Tai Shan.
Hua Mei, 19, is the first panda to be born overseas and returned to China. Born at the San Diego Zoo in the United States in 1999, Hua Mei returned to China in 2004.
After the Wolong base was destroyed during the magnitude-8.0 Wenchuan earthquake in Sichuan in 2008, Hua Mei was transferred to the center’s Bifengxia base in Ya’an.
Six months after Hua Mei returned to China, she gave birth to twin cubs. One of those is Tuan Tuan, one of the two pandas sent to Taiwan in 2008, as ties between the mainland and the island warmed, heralding a relaxation of travel and trade restrictions.
The other cub sent to Taiwan is Yuan Yuan. Together, the duo’s names embody Chinese hopes of reunification.
Mei Sheng, 15, was born at the San Diego Zoo. The male bear is the only panda in the world whose name has two meanings in Chinese —“born in the US” and “beautiful life”.
Keepers and visitors say Mei Sheng is healthy, lively and cute. He likes climbing trees, playing with balls and resting on the swing.
As pandas are unique to China, people in foreign countries and regions are saddened when the cubs born in their cities return home. Some have gone to the center especially to visit the cubs.
Lin Bing was born in Chiangmai, Thailand in 2009. The female panda should have returned home in 2011. But because the Thai people loved her so much, China allowed her to stay in Thailand for two more years.
About two months after she returned, some 200 Thai people took a chartered plane to visit her. They were happy to see that the cub had adapted to the Bifengxia base, said Executive Director Zhang Heming.
Fu Long, a male panda, was born in Austria in 2007. He is the first captive panda born in Europe by parents who mated naturally. Fu Long was the talk of the town among Austrians, who keenly tracked him from getting a name to his first meeting with visitors, first birthday and first walk on snow.
Fu Long returned to China in 2009, and in 2013 his Austrian keeper came to the Dujiangyan base to visit him, according to Wang Yongyao, a center official.
The four bases of the center in the cities of Dujiangyan and Ya’an and the Wolong National Natural Reserve are ideal for visitors all year — especially people who shun the madding crowd — because they are in or adjacent to mountains.
Before the novel coronavirus outbreak, as many as 100,000 people visited the 100-hectare Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding — home to 206 pandas — in Chengdu on major holidays.
The Dujiangyan base of the China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda is adjacent to Mount Qingcheng, a UNESCO World Heritage site, and is accessible from Chengdu, thanks to many daily bullet trains running from the provincial capital to Dujiangyan and vice versa.
The facility got about 4,000 visitors on a busy day before the COVID-19 epidemic, the Dujiangyan base’s Wang Lun said.
Chengdu is about 230 kilometers from the Dengchigou Catholic Church in Baoxing. Travel time between the city and the church is about three and a half hours.
Located on the Futou Hill in the northern suburbs of Chengdu, the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding was set up in 1987 with six sick and hungry pandas rescued from the wild.
In the mid-1970s and early 1980s, bamboo, the staple food of pandas, blossomed and died in Sichuan. The base, which was part of the Chengdu Zoo but became independent in 1993, was involved in the rescue of wild pandas when preparations for the establishment of the base started in 1986.
Visiting the base is a must for first-time visitors to Sichuan because it’s in the suburbs of a provincial capital with easy access to transportation.
The base has a tradition of showcasing its newborn panda cubs during major holidays, such as the International Labor Day and China’s National Day. And visitors can marvel at how small the cubs are by observing them through the transparent windows of a nursery.
The average weight of a newborn cub is around 150 grams. The baby can be held in one hand.
During the International Labor
Day holiday this year, visitors can meet the first captive panda twins of 2020 born at the base on March 17.
Fu Wa, a 17-year-old panda, gave birth to twin males that day.
“It is rare for pandas to give birth in the spring,” base keeper and researcher Wu Kongju said.
Written documents show that Fu Wa’s offspring have been the earliest born in a year. Female pandas typically become ruttish in the spring and give birth in the summer.
Fu Wa, who is between 51 and 68 in human terms, depending on whom you ask, has had five litters of eight cubs, Wu said.
Panda experts are divided on judging the age of a panda. Some say one year is equivalent to three years in human terms, while others say it’s four years.
The base hopes that the birth of the twins helps lift the spirits of the people fighting the novel coronavirus pandemic worldwide.
The base and the Sichuan medical team sent to fight COVID-19 in Hubei province announced the names of the newborns on April 17, their one-month birthday.
The older cub, Reganmian, is named after a traditional snack in Hubei, literally translated as hot dry noodles. The younger was dubbed Danhonggao, a traditional snack made from eggs and flour in Sichuan.
The names represent the strong bond between Sichuan and Hubei, according to the Sichuan medical team.
But Long Hongkun, a tax collector from Xianning, Hubei, discourages visitors from visiting during summer vacation when parents and their student children flock there.
Last summer, Long and a colleague visited the base and found it jam-packed with visitors. They were surrounded with visitors on four sides in the summer heat. It was the pandas who saw people, and not people who saw pandas, they joked.
Also in the northern suburbs of Chengdu is the Chengdu Zoo, one of the earliest in Sichuan to be involved in panda breeding and research.
In 1989, Chengdu Zoo was awarded the Global 500 Roll of Honour for Environmental Achievement by the United Nations Environment Programme for its outstanding contribution to the breeding, research and protection of pandas.
The zoo displays one male panda and three female ones with ages ranging from 7 to 28.
Li Li, 28, gave birth to nine cubs, six of which survived. She is hailed as a hero, said Jing Shimin, the deputy head of the zoo.
The panda house at the zoo imitates natural panda habitat, with many species of bamboo planted inside. Two lotus ponds are in front of the house, and frogs can be heard in summer and autumn, Jing said.
Visitors to the Chengdu Zoo have some pleasant surprises, he said. The zoo keeps 22 Sichuan golden monkeys, which enjoy first-class State protection. With 72 puffer deer, which are also protected, the zoo has the largest captive puffer deer population in China, about 80 percent of the national total.
The zoo has 19 mandrills, which are listed in Appendix I of CITES — the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species. It is the largest captive mandrill population in China. At present, mandrills exhibited in many zoos in China cam from the Chengdu Zoo, Jing said.
If they want to put up for the night, visitors can live in a homestay cluster in David Town to watch drifting clouds over mountain peaks during the daytime, gaze at stars at night and breathe fresh air all day long.” Li Ming, a local guide in Chengdu, Sichuan province