Panda Base

After four months living near these poster children for all things endangered and wild, I finally got out to see them at the panda base just outside the city.

This fellow was looking for food near the entrance. I later saw a female peacock and a very adorable chick, but it was really tough to get a picture – the chick was coloured to blend in with the grass.


You are supposed to visit in the morning when the pandas are feeding. This is as close as I got to one (a metre or so); there was a plastic door between us. They lay on their backs and stuff their faces with bamboo, which is pretty fun to watch.





I got to the base around ten thirty and many of the adult animals were already snoozing.



There are several enclosures for the pandas, mostly grouped by age – adults, young adults, and cubs. There is also a panda nursery, but we didn’t see any babies. I did think the educational aspect of the research base was very well done, with lots of information about the bears' life and the work being done at the station. (There is another, bigger one at Wolong.) These are young pandas.


The red pandas, while not the star attraction, were more fun to watch than the giant pandas – they were much more active, and beautifully coloured.


At the base I saw more foreigners than I had ever seen so far in Chengdu – one man was marveling that he’d paid fifteen US dollars to see two sleeping pandas at San Diego zoo. (Entrance is 30 rmb, about 4.50 CAD) There were a group of Indian men and a group of European tourists. Some were speaking French and some a language I could not identify.

Mother and child monument at the entrance: