Celebrity pandas draw fans and make friends around the world

Panda-related consumer spending and tourism have shot up over the past decade in self-styled 'panda capital' Chengdu.

- Lim Min Zhang China Correspondent

It is a race like no other a 700m dash to be among the first people of the day to see China's top celebrity panda Hua Hua every morning.

At the entrance of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, about a dozen people have gathered when I get there at around 6.30am one Wednesday in October. The facility won't be open for another hour.

Some are toting small action cameras, while others are wearing headbands with panda ears.

When the gates open, some in the queue break into a sprint to get to Villa 6, which is home to Hua Hua, also known as He Hua, and her sister He Ye.

I follow the runners as they catch their breaths and stand in hushed admiration of the two pandas who mill around before dozens of raised phones recording videos.

Hua Hua is well-loved for her distinctive features - the five-year-old is of a small build and is shaped like a triangular onigiri (Japanese rice ball). She has rounded ears, instead of the more common sharper ones, and a tear-shaped eye patch, making her "prettier" than pandas with more rectangular patches, Chinese fans tell me.

Her quarters is the only one in the base that has a limited viewing time of two minutes for each batch of a few dozen people allowed in, but visitors can rejoin the queue multiple times. She is so popular that in April 2024, the Chengdu Bureau of Culture and Tourism announced that Hua Hua had been appointed as its honorary director.

I am in the capital of southwestern Sichuan province to better understand China's fascination with its bamboo-chomping national treasures, or guobao.

While love of the cuddly-looking, black-and-white bear goes back centuries, panda-related consumer spending over the past decade has shot up, as has domestic tourism to Chengdu, the self-styled "panda capital" in Sichuan province.