Broadcasting Time: 2006-11-24

Wu Jia: Hello, and welcome to the last installment of the general knowledge contest on Sichuan. I'm Wu Jia. Today we'll meet the most symbolic animal of Sichuan—the giant panda! Our destination is the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve, 100 kilometers away from Sichuan's capital city, Chengdu.

The first question for today is: Is Sichuan the home of the giant panda?
And question number two: How many wild giant pandas are there in the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve?

This is a song calling for charity and protection of China's national treasure: the giant panda. Named Panda Mimi, the song was composed some 20 years ago after large areas of giant panda's favorite food—arrow bamboo—blossomed and died. Twenty years have passed. Arrow bamboos have retained their green and flourish in the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve, where giant pandas live happily.

Sichuan province is regarded as the home of the giant panda. The Wolong Giant Panda Reserve is situated in the northwestern part of Sichuan. It's one of the most important habitats of giant pandas in China. Pandas in the wild are only seen deep in the mountains of Sichuan and northwestern China's Sha'anxi and Gansu provinces. To see these rare animals in close quarters, the Giant Panda Protection and Research Center in Wolong is the best choice. Zhang Liming is in charge of the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve.

"Our goal is to enable the giant panda to live a healthy and sustainable life here and to provide all those who love the animals with an opportunity to have close contact with the giant panda. We tell visitors about the need and importance of protecting the ecological environment and the history of the giant panda so that they understand the significance of the giant panda as both an ancient animal and a living fossil while watching them."

A round head, large black eye patches and a cuddly, clumsy and above all cute appearance give the giant panda an innocent and childlike quality that people love so much. More than 100 giant pandas currently live in captivity at the Wolong Giant Panda Protection and Research Center. There you can see these dumpy and fluffy animals playing on sliding boards, basking in the sun, climbing trees...and eating like there's no tomorrow.

According to their caregivers, pandas spend about 14 hours a day active: 12 hours gathering and digesting bamboo and two hours traveling, marking scents and reproducing. Giant pandas rest during the remaining 10 hours in two-hour stints.

Pandas were once carnivorous, but they gradually adapted to an almost exclusively herbivorous diet. Ninety-nine percent of a giant panda's diet is bamboo. Since pandas can only absorb about 10 to 18 percent of the nutrients available in the bamboo they eat, it is necessary for them to eat more than 10 kilograms of bamboo a day to meet their daily requirements. The reason behind their weak absorption of nutrients is because giant pandas have a carnivorous digestive system. Such a system is relatively inefficient for digestion, with insufficient bacteria to digest the cellulose of plant matters.

Rebecca Haase is a tourist from the United States. While pandas played with toys and ate bamboo, she took many snapshots of them.

"I'm so happy to finally come out here and see the pandas so close up and see them having so much fun and look so healthy. I hope Wolong continues to have a lot more pandas."

In a well-equipped brood chamber at the Giant Panda Protection and Research Center, one can see what newborn panda cubs look like and how they are raised. A newborn cub will weigh around 15 grams and is all white and blind at birth. The black spots develop after about a month.

Zhang Shichang is from Taiwan. He fixed his eyes on the brood chamber watching how the caregivers feed the newborn panda cubs with milk.

"I learned a lot about the national treasure, the giant panda on this tour. The tour guide told us about the history of the pandas, as well as their living environment. Now I know giant pandas are reproductively challenged. Panda mothers are not very good at raising their own babies."

It's not easy to bring up panda cubs. Some die of congenital or post-natal diseases, others from accidents caused by the mother's carelessness. What's more, adult female pandas are only capable of taking care of one cub after giving birth to two or more cubs in a litter. Others are not able to survive naturally. Researchers now conduct captive conservation of giant pandas in an effort to increase the survival rate of newborn giant pandas.

The conservation of the giant panda has gained support from many people, including tourists who love giant pandas so much that they volunteer to help. Kodama Midori from Japan is one of them. She and three of her friends spent a week with the giant pandas in Wolong.

"I feed the giant pandas every morning. At noon and in the evening, I clean their rooms and purge their fecal matter. Generally speaking, one is not able to have such close contact with pandas. It's very exciting."

If you visit the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve during different seasons, you'll see different aspects of pandas' growth. Li Desheng, an expert on panda studies, says during the cool summer in Wolong, pandas are relatively active. In autumn, one might be lucky enough to see pandas giving birth. The giant panda's mating season begins in spring.

"Adult male pandas in the wild have to fight each other for a spouse. When raised in captivity, such fighting can be avoided. During the mating season for female pandas, we arrange a male panda in a neighboring hut so they can see each other. The females are ordinarily silent, but when they enter their fertile periods, they make noises like birdcalls in the beginning, then dog barks and during the peak of fertility, sounds similar to domestic goats."

Apart from the giant pandas in captivity, there are also more than 100 giant panda population living in the wild in the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve. These wild giant pandas account for one-tenth of the world's total. Their habitats used to be off-limits to ordinary tourists. Nowadays, with the help of a sophisticated surveillance system, tourists are able to observe wild pandas in close quarters.

That ends our tour to the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve, the last stop of our Sichuan journey. Now the last two questions for the quiz. Question number one: Is Sichuan the home of the giant panda? And question number two: How many wild giant pandas are there in the Wolong Giant Panda Reserve?

We invite you to send the answers in to the CRI general knowledge contest on Sichuan sponsored by the Sichuan Provincial Tourism Administration. You can email us at crieng@crifm.com or yinglian@cri.com.cn, or log on to our website at www.crienglish.com. Good luck. We look forward to meeting you in Sichuan, the home of the giant panda!