Revered panda, earthquake victim, buried in China

WOLONG, China — The remains of Mao Mao the panda were gently laid in a wooden crate and wheeled to a freshly dug grave in China's famed Wolong Nature Reserve.

The center's director stood cap in hand and shoveled in a few spades of dirt. Then Mao Mao's keeper stepped forward crying and arranged two apples and a piece of bread by the grave. Three minutes of silence followed as workers gathered around the grave.

Nearly a month after she was killed when China's devastating earthquake collapsed the wall of her enclosure, 9-year-old Mao Mao was laid to rest Tuesday in a quiet corner of the Wolong panda-breeding center.

The facility was damaged by the May 12 quake but officials initially thought all 64 pandas had survived. Then they discovered two were missing. Mao Mao's body was found Monday, buried under debris.

As He Changgui, Mao Mao's keeper, turned away red-eyed after Tuesday's burial, the director of U.S.-based Pandas International, Suzanne Braden, put her arm around him.

"You must look after her babies, OK?" said Braden, who had arrived a day earlier. "And their babies."

He nodded. "I will go back to see her everyday," he said. He had cared for Mao Mao since she was 3, speaking to her in the local Sichuan dialect as he worked.

The loss of the panda, a mother of five, was a blow to the Wolong breeding program, which struggles to recover. The quake was centered just 20 miles away in the heart of Sichuan province's mountainous panda country, and five Wolong staff members were killed.

The endangered panda is revered as a national symbol in China, where about 1,600 pandas live in the wild, mostly in Sichuan and neighboring Shaanxi. An additional 180 have been bred in captivity.

For the staff at Wolong, Mao Mao's loss was all the more acute because she was killed in her prime, said David Wildt, who heads the Center for Species Survival at the Smithsonian's National Zoo in Washington.

"The people who work at Wolong are completely dedicated to those animals" said Wildt, who has worked with the program for more than a decade. "Most of the animals have been born there. The way they are raised, they are handled a great deal. ... They're all named and have their own personalities."

More than 69,000 people were killed by the quake, which left 5 million people homeless, crushing buildings and tossing boulders the size of cars. Aftershocks still rattle the area.

Wedged in a narrow valley, Wolong's panda enclosures were smashed, and the entry gate for visitors was buried under stones.

Now one of the biggest questions is this year's breeding program. The quake hit during what the Chinese delicately call the "falling in love period," — a 24- to 72-hour window each spring when female pandas are fertile — and 18 females had been artificially inseminated. Pandas are difficult to breed, and no one knows what the effects of the quake will be.

"We still don't know how many are pregnant," Huang said.

Also shaken in the quake were the fragile collections of semen from more than 15 pandas, both dead and alive, meant to help the species' diversity. The samples are kept in aging freezers that are still run, like the rest of the center, on a generator — which broke down briefly Tuesday.

"The first things they asked for after the quake were freezers," Braden said. "With only 1,600 pandas left in the wild, genetically every sperm is important."

Now the staff marks the days by little improvements: the return of cellphone service, the first open road to the outside world, the crucial truckloads of bamboo for the pandas, one every five days.

But the breeding center can't stay here, Huang said. It has to move to a safer spot in the Wolong reserve, with more room to grow for the baby pandas.

"It's amazing that we only lost one panda," he said. Another, named Xiao Xiao, remains missing.

As he spoke in his office, there was a rumbling sound. Huangrose from his chair and looked up at the hills.

"Aftershock," he said. "We get one every day."

Lake formed by quake overflows

BEIJING — Low-lying areas in Beichuan, one of the mountainous towns in Sichuan province most devastated by the May 12 earthquake, were flooded Tuesday as a torrent of water spilled from a dangerous lake formed by landslides, dislodging wrecked homes, cars and corpses.

The surge was part of an effort by engineers and soldiers to drain Tangjiashan, one of more than 30 lakes formed by landslides. For weeks, the dam holding back the Jian River has threatened to burst and flood towns downstream that are home to 1.3 million people.

The outflow means the water level of Tangjiashan soon could drop to a nonhazardous level, reported Xinhua, the official state news agency.

The New York Times