P
an Pan has been doing his bit for modern
China, and at the grand old age of 30, he’s
earned his retirement.
“Pan Pan means ‘Hero Father,’” my guide,
Jack Feng, explains. “He’s sired 130 cubs in 20 years.”
I look at the world’s oldest male panda, lying on his
back in a generous green enclosure — one of 40 at
the Dujiangyan Panda Base. The vegetarian bear chews
noisily on a length of leafy bamboo. “That’s over six
cubs a year,” I say. “No wonder he’s taking it easy.”
I ask Jack if the word ‘panda’ actually means
something in Chinese? “People think it’s the Chinese
name for the animal, but it’s not. We call it xiong mao,
which translates as ‘bear cat’. There’s a story that the
word ‘panda’ comes from a French missionary called
Father Armand David, who was the fi rst European to
discover the animal. In 1869, he was shown a panda
skin by a hunter and he asked what it was. The hunter
described the animal using the words ‘fat’ and ‘big’.
Which in Chinese is ‘pang da’.”
The word is also said to have some Nepalese roots too,
but, regardless, during my two hours in the reserve, the
animal I thought of as an ‘endangered vegetarian panda’
turns out to be none of these things.
The bear cat is an omnivore — in fact, eight million
years ago it was a lean carnivore (it still retains
relic canines in its lower jaw). And, thanks to the
e orts of six panda reserves in Sichuan Province (as
well as some heroic copulation by Pan Pan), it’s no
longer endangered: in May 2016, the WWF o cially
reclassifi ed it as ‘vulnerable’, with over 1,400 animals
now doing quite nicely in the wild.
Pan Pan has also helped to reveal a simple truth. Like
most people in the West, I think I know China — it’s
the place where 1.35 billion people live in choked-up
cities, marching inexorably towards lifestyles enjoyed
in the West.
Clearly I’m in need of some re-education.LUXURY, CHINESESTYLE
My lessons are conducted in a mountainous corner of
Sichuan Province.
I base myself for fi ve days at the new Six Senses
Qing Cheng Mountain, a luxury resort located at the
foot of Mount Qingcheng. It’s on the edge of a small
city (‘small’ meaning half-a-million people) called
Dujiangyan, which in turn is a satellite of the Chengdu
megalopolis, peopled with a rather more substantial
15 million.
The resort is owned by US venture capitalists and
o ers a contemporary escape for wealthy Chinese
— an almost unthinkable proposition 35 years ago,
when the only fi ve stars that Chinese people saw were
those fl uttering overhead on Chairman Mao’s red fl ag.
It’s a walled compound with a distinct Zen vibe, with
113 suites that echo an ancient village and the sort
of gardens that once moved emperors to poetry. Its
three restaurants, spa and 30-metre swimming pool
o er perhaps the greatest luxuries of all for Chinese
guests — space.
But it’s not long before the very otherness of China
becomes apparent. There’s the internet for instance. Or
more exactly, there’s not the internet. I’ve got wi-fi in
my suite but the ‘Great Firewall of China’ means I need
to do a complex virtual private network workaround to
access non-Chinese websites — and no amount of geek
trickery will get me onto Twitter or Facebook.
Unlike in the West, the resort is practically empty
most weeks. This is because the Chinese take their
breaks according to a well-defi ned calendar of publicNovember 2016 117CHINA