As a prelude - and to explain the joke in the heading - in Madagascar, the best animated film of our time, the pompous King Julian, lord of the lemurs, greets his visitors from New York with:
"Welcome, giant pansies. Please feel free to bask in my glow."
At Chengdu's Giant Panda Sanctuary, the roles are reversed. We are welcomed by the giant pandas - with a nonchalance that King Julian would be proud of - and spend the next couple of hours basking in their glow.
The youngest "giant" panda was curled up in an incubator, weighing in at a precious 122 grams on day one. Three cubs played in a wooden cot, two metres by two metres. Two twins, five months old, spent most of their time wrestling with each other, only to be interrupted from their minder to sit in plastic bucket on a set of digital scales - Weightwatchers for pandas. The third cub, almost three months old, spent all of her time trying to play with the older two, but was having difficulty getting traction on the polished wooden floor of the cot. She spent most of her time on her stomach, feet splayed wide, a plump, cuddly Chinese version of Bambi on ice.
Outside, in the mid-morning Sichuan mist, the adult giant pandas had a late breakfast of bamboo. Each day, the gastronomically-confused "carnivores" munch through nine to fourteen kilograms of bamboo shoots. It's no wonder that they spend some of that eating time lying down.
Unfortunately, all of this eating seems to affect the pandas' libido, making it difficult for conservationists to increase the captive population in Chengdu. In the name of "science", the male pandas have been shown videos of other pandas mating (i.e. panda p*rn) and some have received trial doses of Viagra.
We have been mesmorised by the pandas' laconic mannerisms and (literally) laid-back attitude. With their teddy-bear good looks, it is hardly surprising that the giant panda found itself in a diplomatic position in the 1970s, smoothing tensions between China and the US in the détente period of the Cold War (the so-called "Panda diplomacy") as well as the mascot for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF). In the spirit of modern Chinese capitalism, these days each giant panda leased to foreign zoos earns a cool US $1 million a year.
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