What this day is, and what it is not
Almost every Chengdu programme includes the panda base, and almost every one of them gives it three hours in the morning before moving on. This one does not move on. We stay for the day, and we use the time the way the base is actually organised - which is as a research and breeding institution that happens to admit visitors, not as a zoo with a gift shop.
How the base began
In the 1980s the arrow bamboo across the Qionglai mountains flowered and died, and pandas that could not find food were brought in and concentrated at the Chengdu zoo. In 1987 the city government established the breeding base for them; ground was broken that March and the first stage finished in 1988. The founding population was six sick or starving animals rescued from the wild. Everything since has been bred from those animals - the base has not taken a single panda out of the wild - and by December 2020 the captive population had reached 216, around a quarter of all the giant pandas held in captivity anywhere.
Morning - the enclosures, read properly
We start early, because pandas do. A giant panda spends most of its waking hours eating, and the feeding is concentrated in the morning; by eleven most of the animals are flat out and the day is over as far as they are concerned. Your guide takes you through the enclosures in an order that follows the animals rather than the map, and explains what you are looking at: how the bamboo species on offer change with the season, why a panda eats fifteen to twenty kilos of it a day and digests almost none of it, and how a keeper reads an animal's condition at a glance.
The young animals
The centre is best known for its nursery and cub-rearing work, and if there are cubs in the rearing rooms when you visit, that is where the morning ends. Cubs are born at about one nine-hundredth of their mother's weight - pink, blind and helpless - and the first months are a round-the-clock operation. Our guide will be straight with you about what is visible on your date: what is on show changes with the breeding cycle, and no programme can promise you a newborn. What is reliably here is the whole age range from juveniles to adults, and the mountainside 'villas' the older animals live in.
Lunch
Lunch near the base, taken when the animals have gone quiet.
Afternoon - the museum, and the rest of the mountain
After lunch we go into the Giant Panda Museum, which opened its new building in March 2021 and is the only interactive museum anywhere devoted entirely to the species: seven galleries running from the panda's ancestry and its fossil range, through the discovery of the animal by the outside world, the decades when it was hunted and its habitat cut apart, to the conservation programmes operating today. This is where the day stops being about photographs. The story the museum tells - a species reduced to a few thousand animals in fragmented mountain ranges, then slowly brought back by protecting bamboo forest rather than by breeding alone - is the part that most three-hour visits miss entirely.
The base also keeps red pandas and golden snub-nosed monkeys, and the expanded grounds opened in stages from 2022 add a great deal of walking on hillside paths. We finish the afternoon on those paths at an unhurried pace, which is also the answer to the practical question of how to see the place without being carried along by the crowd.
Practical
The base is at 1375 Panda Avenue in Chenghua District. Admission 55 yuan plus 30 yuan for the internal shuttle, both included. We go on foot for the parts that matter and use the shuttle for the long climbs. Comfortable shoes, and no expectation of an early finish - this is a full day.
Meals
Lunch
Accommodation
Day programme - no hotel night included.
