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Pandas, conservation, and what the numbers actually are
The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding is about ten kilometres north of the city and is one of the two places most visitors see pandas, the other being Bifengxia further west. It is a research and breeding institution rather than a zoo, and the practical consequence for a visitor is the one 林悦 gives in the first line: go at opening time. Giant pandas sleep somewhere between ten and sixteen hours a day, are most active in the early morning, and by mid-morning in warm weather you are looking at motionless grey-and-white shapes in trees. The numbers are worth having right, because they are widely misreported. The wild population was counted at 1,864 in the fourth national survey, published in 2015 — that is the figure behind 林悦's 一千八百多只 — and it represented a substantial recovery from around 1,100 in the 1980s. On the strength of that, the species was reclassified in 2016 from Endangered to Vulnerable by the IUCN, a decision China's own forestry authorities were initially cautious about. Captive numbers have grown much faster, to something over six hundred, because artificial breeding finally began to work in the 2000s after decades of failure. Releasing captive-bred animals into the wild remains genuinely hard and only a handful have survived it. What conservation people will tell you, if you ask, is that the number of animals is not the interesting figure. The constraint is habitat: the wild population lives in something like thirty separate fragments of mountain bamboo forest across Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, separated by roads, farmland and settlements, and small isolated groups are vulnerable in ways a headline total does not show. The recent work has been on corridors between fragments rather than on breeding. It is also fair to note the argument that the panda absorbs a disproportionate share of Chinese conservation money and attention because it is charismatic, and the counter-argument that its habitat overlaps with a great many other endangered species which benefit from the same protection. Both positions are held by serious people. Two practical notes. You cannot hold a panda: the paid photo opportunities that used to exist have been stopped at the major bases, and anywhere still offering one is worth being suspicious of. And the base is genuinely large — allow half a day, wear something you can walk in, and go on a weekday if you can, because on a public holiday the viewing platforms are as crowded as the Bund in lesson 58.