In the upper reaches of the mountain, forests and wild flowers can be seen everywhere. If visitors are lucky, they may find wild fungi as big as a bowl. Going higher in the mountain, the foliage suddenly opens up into a pristine alpine meadow. At 4, meters above sea level, the area is barren and the ground is covered with sharp rocks. The mountain peak is covered with snow throughout the year.
During the months from October to April, the snow level can get up to the knees, while there is less snow during summer months. Adjacent is the Erguniang Second Sister Peak. Every summer, rare animals scamper around the wild green trees and plants here.
The mountain peak is dangerous and snow-covered the year round. The Sanguniang Third Sister Peak has beautiful scenery, complex landforms, and a rich variety of animal and plant species. The Yaomei Youngest Sister Peak is dotted with glaciers, beryl mines, forests and lakes. According to local folklore, the four sisters turned into mountains on the fourth day of the fifth month on the lunar calendar.
Today, every year on this day, people of all ages from the local Tibetan and Qiang groups all dress up in traditional attire, bring butter, barley wine, barley cake, and other food to offer a sacrifice on the natural altar of the Siguniang Mountains, Guozhuangping, and worship the mountain god. Panda Conservation Every year, millions of visitors travel from around the world to see the mysterious panda kingdom located in the region of Wenchuan County in Ngawa Tibetan-Qiang Autonomous Prefecture, otherwise known as the Sichuan Wolong Nature Reserve.
Share to:. Links Vice premier stresses facilitating employment of college graduates in Hubei Virus-hit Hubei Province to boost employment for poor residents. Chinese Dictionary. They are certainly too precious to eat, but their flavor might also have kept them off the dinner table. In a bid to dispose of the evidence, he chopped up the bear and stir-fried its meat with turnips. It was a dish so inedible he ended up feeding it to his pigs. He also gave some to his sister. The court sentenced Leng to two years in prison.
Though rarely hunted for food, pandas have been hunted for their fur, or just for sport. Former U. The brothers said they fired at the same time, and both claimed the kill. They were so pleased with their conquest that they wrote a tell-all, Trailing the Giant Panda. In , New York dress designer and socialite Ruth Harkness captured a baby male panda in Sichuan that she bottle-fed and named Su Lin.
In , Chi-chi, originally slated for sale to a U. Deciding that there was no better candidate than the lovable Chi-chi, the WWF chose the panda as its official logo in , and the black-and-white bamboo-munching creature has been an international symbol of wildlife conservation ever since. China made giant pandas a protected species in , the first captive-bred panda cub was born in , and poaching was criminalized in , setting strict new penalties of at least ten years in jail or even death.
Even so, it took time to stamp out the practice of panda poaching. Three smuggled pelts were reported seized by Hong Kong customs authorities in , and China arrested for panda hunting in , recovering pelts.
Although intentionally harming a panda is now unthinkable, other bear species do not enjoy the same protections. Chinese today still consume the bile extracted from moon bears, sun bears, and brown bears; the substance is believed to be therapeutic and is an ingredient in traditional Chinese medicine.
Yet bile extraction is a painful and invasive process, and some bear bile farms keep bears locked in tiny cages for years at a time. She told Foreign Policy that it is a "source of great sadness" to see other bears in China "maligned and cruelly exploited in bear farms across the country.
Pandas and other bears "share so many similarities but are treated so very differently," she said. Only a few have dared argue against trying to save the pandas, calling the effort doomed and a waste of money. It spends a fortune on panda preservation, from breeding parks to research, but also earns millions of dollars annually by leasing the animals to overseas zoos and by displaying them as tourist attractions at home. Over the past several decades, Chinese scientists have developed and honed the difficult techniques required to breed pandas in captivity, in making a breakthrough that may help pandas bred in captivity to return to the wild.
They are among the botanically richest sites of any region in the world outside the tropical rain forests, with between and species of flora in over genera. Though the pandas mostly stay inside during the hottest summer months, the rest of the year they live outdoors in spacious playpens.
During our visit we witness how they spent the day: chewing on bamboo shoots, climbing trees, sleeping and excreting waste. I thought pandas are slow, calm animals, but at feeding time they got very active, especially the cubs frolicked — rolling around and chasing each other up trees, with one even doing a backward flip on a log platform.
Most of the older pandas were snoozing, on the ground or perched in trees, the babies, tiny, blind, and pink, with few hairs, are on display in breeders. The giant panda, because of its much wider range of distribution, had more than a dozen regional names, such as Pixiu , Mo , Zouyu , Whitebear , Flowery-bear , Linyun — cloud in the forest and Iron-eating Animal. They are also called Chinabear , Bamboobear , Silverdog and Giant raccoon.
It is written in the Annals, Biographies of Five Emperors, that years ago, Emperor Huang used to have pandas pixiu — ancient name for the Giant Panda for the purpose of fighting. The famous Chinese historian Sima Qian of the Han Dynasty notes in Records of the Five Emperors , as early as years ago, a head of a tribe, called Huangdi , used tamed wild animals to defeat another tribe headed by Yandi at Banquan now Zhulu County of Henan Province.
Giant Pandas were considered an animal that was brave and mighty as tigers and leopards; for that reason, ancient warriors were compared to Giant Pandas, whose name Pixiu was used to symbolize victory in all wars. When the great poet of Tang Dynasty Bai Juyi was resting in a quiet residence, he felt cold and had a headache because of the chilly wind.
Someone then gave him a screen on which a giant panda was painted. The bamboo screen brought about a magic effect to drive out his illness. By saying that giant pandas need a peaceful environment for survival, the poet expresses his concern about the misfortunes and famines brought to the common people by wars. Bai Juyi considered that pandas had mystical powers capable of making natural disaster go away or evil spirits disappear.
This creature had teeth strong enough to bite through iron, copper, and the joints of bamboo, and could chew the nails off a city gate, its stomach acids could easily dissolve these tough items.
Hench the name Iron-eating Animal. Mo were said to have lived in the areas of Sichuan and Guizhou especially on Mount Emei in Guizhou , and sometimes ate tripods and cooking utensils if these were mistakenly left out by travelers.
The Mo was also believed to consume snakes and other reptiles. Its bones were said to be nearly solid, with very little space for marrow; and their teeth were strong enough that axes and knives could be broken trying to cut them; the teeth could not be destroyed by fire.
Later texts describe the Panda as having a nose like an elephant, eyes like a rhinoceros, a tail like an ox, and paws like a tiger. When warring armies took to the battlefield, if one army raised a flag with an image of the Zhouyu, the battle would immediately be called to a halt and a temporary peace would ensue. To this day, the panda continues to be a symbol of peace, and China has gifted pandas to many nations, such as Soviet Union, Japan, North Korea, United States, Britain, France, Germany, Spain and Mexico, as a gesture of peaceful relations.
Read more. Later on, the Chinese writing system underwent a reform, and people visiting the Beipei Museum read the sign in a wrong way. Now, the Chinese official name of the Giant Panda became Xiongmao. The local name of the giant panda around Chengdu, however, is still white old bear or flowery bear. All of these local names, retain the meaning of a white or white-and-black bear-like animal.
Possibly derived from a Nepali word referring to the ball of the foot-perhaps a keen observation of how this bear eats bamboo with an adapted wrist bone that functions as an opposable thumb and sixth digit.
The modern name giant panda can be attributed to the French missionary Armand Pere David , who lived in China for 12 years from to A natural historian, David has found 68 new species of birds, over one hundred species of insects, and many mammal species-including the Milu deer, golden monkey and the giant pandas- in various places of China. In March , David came to the catholic church in Dengchigou of Muping now Banshan County of Sichuan and became the fourth preaching priest there.
The skin was quite peculiar. Li told me that I would see this animal very soon, for his hunters were going to hunt this animal —. They brought a young whitebear to me. It was caught alive, but was killed only to bring it back more easily. The body of the whitebear was all white except that the legs, the ears and the places around its two eyes are black.
It has the same skin color as a grown-up bear that I have seen before. I believe it to be a new species, not only because of its skin color, but also because of the hair beneath its feet and other characteristics. David sent this specimen of whitebear to Melne Edwards, the director of the Natural Museum of Paris, who studied the skin and skeleton of the animal and published a paper in , announcing.
It must be a new species, and I name it Ailuropoda. The first giant panda specimen collected by David is still kept in the Natural Museum of Paris.
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