Chengdu, panda town

In 1718 the Kangxi emperor stationed Manchu bannermen and their families in Chengdu and built them a walled town of their own in the west of the city, Shaocheng, the Little City. It had more than thirty lanes, and the Han population of Chengdu was not allowed inside them.

The Qing fell in 1911, the walls came down, and the Little City became simply part of Chengdu. Most of the lanes went the way of most lanes. Three of them survived, were restored over about five years, and reopened in 2008 as what you walk through now: courtyard houses behind wooden gates, carved stone, tiled roofs, which is northern architecture sitting a very long way south of where it belongs.

Whether that counts as preservation or as a shopping street with unusually good bones is a question you can settle over the tea.

Frederic Cuvier described the red panda in 1825 and called it Ailurus fulgens, the shining cat. Thomas Hardwicke had got there in 1821 but did not publish until 1827, which in taxonomy counts as not getting there at all. The word panda itself is probably Nepali, from a term for the ball of the foot, or for bamboo eater, depending on which etymologist you ask.

Then in 1869 Armand David, a French missionary working in the mountains west of Chengdu, was shown a black and white skin at a farmhouse. The giant panda entered the European record, took the name, and eventually took the word.

They are not close relatives. The giant panda is a bear. The red panda is the last surviving member of its own family, the Ailuridae, with raccoons, weasels and skunks as its nearest living cousins. What they share is a mountain range, a diet of bamboo that neither animal is properly built to digest, and a wrist bone enlarged into something that works as a thumb, which the two of them evolved separately. The red pandas here are the Chinese kind, which a 2020 genetic study argued is a species of its own rather than a subspecies of the Himalayan one.

Numbers, roughly. Giant pandas: just under two thousand in the wild at the last national survey, and somewhere around seven hundred and fifty in captivity worldwide. Red pandas: perhaps ten thousand left in the wild, and falling. Which makes the one you can walk right up to here the rarer of the two.

It opened in 1987 with six giant pandas rescued from the wild. That was the decade the arrow bamboo flowered and died back across the mountains west of Chengdu, which it does every few decades, and an animal that eats almost nothing else was left with almost nothing to eat. The six were what came down out of the hills.

Breeding pandas in captivity was, at that point, something nobody was much good at. A female is receptive for two or three days a year. A cub is born at around a nine hundredth of its mother’s weight, blind and pink and the size of a stick of butter. Twins are common, and a mother in the wild will usually raise only one of them. A good deal of the work here went into that second problem, the incubator and the rotation that keeps both cubs alive, and it is the reason the numbers moved at all.

By 2008 there had been 124 births at the base and 83 pandas living in it. Nothing has been taken from the wild since the founding six.

Which is worth holding on to while you are standing at the fence with four hundred other people. Every animal in front of you was born in a place like this one, and most of them will never see a mountain.

Chengdu made brocade. Under the Han the trade was important enough to have its own official, the brocade officer, and the city took a nickname from him, Jinguan Cheng, the Brocade Officer City. The river the cloth was washed in is still called the Jin, the Brocade River. Jinli means roughly the brocade quarter, and by the time of the Shu Han kingdom in the third century a street of that name was the busiest commercial street in the state.

Not this one. The lane you walk down now was built next to the Wuhou Shrine and opened in October 2004: 350 metres of Qing style western Sichuan architecture, put up on purpose, with the Three Kingdoms theme borrowed from the shrine next door. The shrine is the real thing, a temple to Zhuge Liang, chancellor of Shu, on a site associated with him since around the sixth century.

So Jinli is a new street using an old name for a decent reason. The original was somewhere near here, doing more or less exactly this. Being sold something is not the same as being lied to.