Panda habitat to be built in Sichuan

Giant Panda Ai Li at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Chengdu, Sichuan province, Nov 1, 2011. [Photo by She Yi/Asianewsphoto]

A panda habitat is to be built at a Sichuan beauty spot where the Oscar-winning film Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon was partly shot.

The Changning county government signed an agreement on Friday with the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in the Sichuan provincial capital of Chengdu to jointly build a panda habitat at the Southern China Bamboo Sea beauty spot.

Covering 291 hectares, Panda World will have 74 hectares of forest, a lake and 58 types of bamboo, the staple food for pandas, said Zhang Zhihe, head of the Chengdu research base.

He said that when Panda World is completed in five years, it will have 10 pandas from the Chengdu base which visitors can see from a distance.

When it was set up in 1987, the Chengdu base had only six sick and hungry pandas saved from the wild, but is now home to 108 .

While boosting tourism in Changning, the new habitat is expected to prevent disease outbreaks in the pandas.