Creating China’s New Giant Panda National Park

Published with National Geographic, August 2020

The radio was dead. Waterlogged, no doubt, like our shoes, socks, and skin. Walls of bamboo listed under the weight of fresh snow, then catapulted it down our necks as we stamped our numb feet in drifts. A Sichuanese ranger tossed final splashes of rice wine and a cigarette onto a pyramid of twigs. A feeble flame licked it. Sputtered. Vanished into the wet air.

This was October, 9,000 feet high with eight new rangers in the heart of China’s new Giant Panda National Park. A day before we had set out from their home village, Guanba, to complete a routine patrol checking camera traps and searching for poachers. But battered by unexpected rain and snow, we had gotten off track in one of the valley’s many twisting ravines. No one quite said the worst “lost”, but neither did anyone quite know which way to go from the ridgeline: down left or down right? Everything looked the same in that tunnel of bamboo, snow, and fog.

“Make sure you grab a handful, not just one,” warned Li Xinrui, one of the younger rangers, as I stretched down for a stalk of slippery bamboo to aid a descent down a short, craggy pitch. Exhaust clouded Li’s usually bright eyes as he let go of his own bamboo hold and descended down the next cliff. We spent that night wet and hungry in a cave once used by hunters, each silently meditating on just how hard this mission was becoming, at how hard creating a national park would be.

The Giant Panda National Park, first proposed as a pilot by the Chinese government in 2015 to become one of the nation’s first national parks, now spreads across three provinces and protects most of the remaining 2,000 wild pandas’ natural habitat. The park is one of the most significant conservation actions for pandas in the last quarter century and I had the privilege of documenting the labor of its setup across its forested mountains and hidden villages. You can read more about it with National Geographic here and here.