I'm the national treasure and I hate noise.

When visiting the Giant Panda Breeding Research Base in ChengDu I came across this sign.

Signs in Chinese are often very funny because of a combination of factors. First there is the fact that most of Chinese does not directly translate to English because of various cognitive and grammatic structures at the foundation of the Chinese language and Latin or Germanic based languages. This sign reflects the cognitive differences between the cultures, and it is simply amusing.

The Chinese people are very loud most of the time, I have not yet been able to figure out why, but this is unarguably so.
A simple sign along the lines of "quiet please" or "the animals require quiet" is not flashy enough to catch the eye of the average person in China and so more grandeur statements are needed. Needless to say I am considering getting a print of this and placing it on my door.

Far from being nearly magical creatures of legend, the Giant Panda (Da Xiong Mao or big bear cat) is a cute, lumbering testemant against the normal arguments for Natural Selection. This large, once carnivorous species has adapted itself to feed on bamboo but will only eat 40 of the 300 species of bamboo found in the world. It's home climate is occasionally snowy and occasionally lush green, but mostly it is misty. The mists might give some excuse for its appearance. The Giant Panda eats and sleeps as its primary activities. It is only able to process a small fraction of what it eats and so most of its weight is actually left over fiber which it has eaten that day. While pregnant Panda's will still occasionally consume carrion, it is mostly for the Iron and not for the sake of protein. Panda's are extremely sensitive to environmental fluctuations and mass starvations have been recorded when one type of their bamboo failed to flower in the wild that year. For the most part these creatures are incredibly docile and they are in fact very attending to their youth.





Giant Panda's naturally are very solitary creatures and live a great distance apart from one another. So when the season comes for mating it is some chore for two prospective partners to find one another. First, the female is only in the mood, as it were, for a very brief time. Sometime a month, sometimes only a few days. Secondly she can be very picky about who she is interested in. Lastly even if they have a child, the mother Panda can only care for one, so if twins are born she crushes one in its sleep rather than let it starve to death. The surviving child however is carried at all times for its first two weeks of like and kept completely clean at all times. Once it starts developing fur she will let it walk around a little. I do not have any pictures but I was able to visit the Breeding center during August which is the season for new cubs.

There five cubs in all in the nursery at the time I was there. Four small ones, maybe 30 days old and about the size of a terrier and one larger one which looked the size of a koala. The four smaller ones were soundly sleeping but the big one was still awake. It kept trying to stand on its four paws, but the wood of the play-pen they were in was too slippery so it looked more like it was trying to swim.

After seeing the baby Panda swimming on wood, I began to seriously question one of the old Chinese legends. By legend the yellow emperor the emperor who first united China, trained Tigers and Panda's to fight along with his armies. Such a story seems wholly unbelievable, and did to me until I witnessed the Panda Wrestling Foundation present King of the Hill.


















The full match went on for three rounds with the victor being a surprise entry into the contest, the Large, awake, one looking in on the other two. We only thought to snap a video towards the very end of the second first round and since the camera didn't have enough memory we didn't get any more.

I will soon have more pictures from ChengDu up for everyone and some stories from there. This blog was more of an amateur editorial than a first hand account, but now and then the change of pace can be entertaining.