Hey everyone, welcome to World Heritage Journey.
For today's video, we're at the Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries
in Sichuan province, central China.
Now as you're probably aware, the giant panda is both a national symbol of China, and it's
also critically endangered.
There aren't many of them living in the wild outside of captivity.
This World Heritage Site covers most of their remaining habitats in the mountains of Sichuan
province in China.
Now we've come here to their habitats, but of course pandas - because they're so rare
- are basically impossible to find in the wild.
So to see some pandas we've done the next best thing,
we've gone to their breeding place. Let's have a look.
The world heritage site here covers a huge area of Giant Panda habitat: over 9000 square
kilometres, across seven nature reserves and nine scenic parks.
These areas are also home to other endangered species like red panda, snow leopard, and
clouded leopard.
There's also a huge variety of plants too.
But having visited the pandas' habitats and not seen any pandas, we headed to one of the
best locations to see these gentle giants: the Research Base for Panda Breeding on the
outskirts of Chengdu.
This facility was founded in the 1980s to help protect and conserve giant pandas, and
to date has bred nearly 300 pandas.
They have a partnership with a reintroduction facility nearby, where pandas are released
back into the wild in their natural habitat, and their numbers are slowly increasing
which is really good news.
We were lucky enough to see some infant panda cubs, only a couple of months old - and were
surprised to learn that pandas are born without their distinctive black spots!
Overall it was a very enjoyable morning, wandering around the facility and seeing the pandas
feeding, playing, climbing, and of course..
sleeping!