Next up in the Panda Reception Hall area is the second of 4 pavilions, the Reflecting Sun Pavilion, which has the same set up as the Spring Sun Pavilion with two indoor viewing spaces and then outdoor yards. Here I also didn’t see every panda that was living in this pavilion, but I did see 5 different ones – currently there are 6 listed as living here on the app. On the first day I saw 3 pandas, one solo and one female pair although I didn’t get any good photos of the pair (Run Yue 润玥 and Ai Jiu 艾玖, born in 2020). On the second day I saw two different solo pandas, again one I didn’t get very good pictures from (Cheng Shi 成实, born in 2016 and actually was one of the first cubs I ever saw!). So I saw almost everyone here!

When walking from the original section of the base to the new section, the Panda Reception Hall area is the first you will come to, and within that the Spring Sun Pavilion is the first panda house you will see of the 4 houses in this section. All 4 of the pavilions have inside and outside viewing for the pandas, but on my visit all the pandas were kept inside due to the high temperatures. Us humans are all outside for all the viewing and because it’s all glass on the pandas inside homes, there were sometimes difficulties in seeing with reflections. This also meant that I didn’t see all the pandas living in each pavilion – they rotate the use of the inside areas, so some pandas were in off-show areas due to the outside yards not being in use. So in some areas I saw different pandas on both days, and some I saw the same pandas. In the Spring Sun Pavilion I happened to see a trio of young ones on both days, and then the same sub-adult male on both days – currently on the app there are 6 pandas listed for this pavilion, so I potentially didn’t see 2 of them (perhaps they weren’t living in this pavilion on my trip however).

Next up is the only panda that I saw in the No6 Villa, Yun Wu 韵武. He was born in 2018, making him almost 6 years old on my visit – it’s likely I saw him in 2018 in the kindergarten on my trip that year. There’s not much information about him online at all, but he has a twin sister, Yun Wen, and there are a lot of cute videos online of them and their peers as little cubs which are super sweet. What I really wanted to share in these photos is the really nice example of scent marking in the final two photos – even though it was towards the end of May, it’s still the last part of the breeding season, and while at 6 he may not be fully mature, he’s clearly showing starting signs of maturity. I’ve never been able to get good pictures of a male scent marking/hand standing and peeing on a tree before, so this is exciting for the panda reproductive scientist in me!