The Diequan Garden 蝶泉园 is the furthest away area at the Dujiangyan Panda Base and has 5 different panda enclosures, at the time of my visit a total of 8 pandas were living here. The most popular inhabitant of this area was Le Le – he was born in Singapore in 2021 and moved to China in January 2024, but more on him in the next post! This area ended up being quite busy, lots of the school groups were here (so another round of photos and telling them where we were from) and there was also a small snack stand selling drinks and ice creams, so many people were crowded there. In the end I didn’t end up seeing two of the pandas who were in this area, Nong Nong 檂檂 and Su Yang 苏阳 were preferring their indoor spaces this time. These two are relatively young males of almost 4 and 5 years old respectively. There are a lot of cute videos online of both pandas that you can check out, so I’m a little sad I didn’t see them.
Xi Xi 茜茜
One of the pandas who was up and about was Xi Xi 茜茜 – she is an older female, almost 26 years old at the time of my visit. She has had cubs in her lifetime, but now will be past reproductive age and enjoying her older years. Unfortunately I haven’t been able to find out any more information about her. Her yard was large and very shaded, so she had plenty of spots to stay out of the sun. She was pretty active when I was there, walking around most of the yard space. There were lots of viewing options, with paths almost all the way around the boundary wall of her yard, even though it was busy no-one had to push to get in to the front or stand a few people back.
Xing Ye 星野 and Mu Ye 牧野
The pandas in the furthest yard in this area (actually, this is the yard I saw San Diego-born Mei Sheng for the first time in 2016) were a set of male twins who were almost 5 years old – Xing Ye 星野 and Mu Ye 牧野. It was lunchtime when we got to these pandas so they had a huge pile of bamboo in the middle and were thoroughly enjoying. Their enclosure was also pretty shaded so they had plenty of space to stay out of the sun. I couldn’t find much information online about these two other than that their mother is Cao Cao 草草 (who may be the Cao Cao I saw at Wolong Shenshuping). These two seemed to be lapping up the attention and were happy to be around the front of the yard which was pretty much completely lined with a few rows of people the whole time we were there.
