The National Zoo’s Giant Pandas Are Finally Making Their Public Debut

Meilan Solly

Senior Associate Digital Editor, History

After 443 days, Washington, D.C.’s panda drought has finally come to an end.

Beginning this Friday, January 24, giant pandas Bao Li and Qing Bao are officially on view to the public at the Smithsonian’s National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute (NZCBI). The 3-year-old bears arrived in Washington this past October, undergoing a quarantine period before making their debut.

Bao Li, a male whose name translates to “active and vital power,” and Qing Bao, a female whose name means “green” and “treasure,” “have already won the hearts of our staff and volunteers,” said NZCBI’s director, Brandie Smith, in a statement earlier this month, “and we are excited to welcome panda fans back to the Zoo—the only place in the nation where you can see giant pandas for free—and celebrate the newest chapter of our giant panda breeding and conservation program.”

According to an NZCBI blog post, keepers say Bao Li is “playful, curious and attention-seeking,” while Qing Bao is more independent and spends much of her time hanging out in trees. When provided with a pile of ice shavings as enrichment, “Qing Bao didn’t care about it, but Bao Li loved it,” said keeper Mariel Lally in a separate blog post. “He stomped on it, rolled around in it and pushed his ball over to it. Everything is new to him, so he’s having a lot of fun right now.”

The pair are the ninth and tenth pandas to call the nation’s capital home, not counting cubs that died before being named or shortly after birth. Longtime NZCBI residents Mei Xiang and Tian Tian, along with their youngest son, Xiao Qi Ji, moved to China in November 2023, fulfilling an agreement with the China Wildlife Conservation Association (CWCA), which owns the vast majority of pandas held in captivity. The trio’s departure left Washington without pandas for the first time in 23 years.

Under NZCBI’s new agreement with the CWCA, Qing Bao and Bao Li will remain in the United States for ten years, until April 2034, in exchange for an annual fee of $1 million. The pair are still too young to breed, as pandas only reach sexual maturity between ages 4 and 7. “Kind of picture them as like awkward teenagers right now,” Lally told WUSA9. “We still have about two years before we would probably even see signs that they’re ready to start mating.”

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If the bears produce offspring, their cubs will leave for China by age 4 to participate in a giant panda breeding program aimed at increasing the species’ population. Thanks to conservation programs at NZCBI, in China and further afield, pandas—once classified as endangered—are now only considered vulnerable.

Speaking with Smithsonian magazine last May, when NZCBI announced the species’ imminent arrival in Washington, Smith said she’d initially thought that pandas wouldn’t return for “two, maybe three years.” In 2023, amid rising tensions between the U.S. and China, the CWCA allowed multiple loan agreements with partners in the West to lapse, prompting zoos in Washington, Memphis and Edinburgh to send their pandas back to China.

The change in policy sparked fears that the era of “panda diplomacy,” in which China gifted or lent the black-and-white bears to other countries to influence diplomatic relations, was coming to an end. Luckily for panda lovers, Chinese President Xi Jinping soon signaled his country’s willingness to continue lending the animals to the U.S. A breeding pair named Yun Chuan and Xin Bao arrived at the San Diego Zoo in June 2024, becoming the first giant pandas to enter the U.S. in 21 years.

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“The fact that we have pandas here this quickly—it’ll be less than a year—[is] a testament to the strong partnership and relationship that we have with our panda colleagues in China,” Smith said in May.

To prepare for Qing Bao and Bao Li’s arrival, NZCBI renovated its panda habitat, adding new outdoor fencing and platform structures for the animals to “climb on and lay on,” Laurie Thompson, assistant curator of giant pandas, told Smithsonian last May. Staff made more dramatic changes to the bears’ indoor habitat, adding murals of mountainous landscapes, black locust timber climbing structures, new flooring and upgraded air conditioning. Safety and security were of paramount importance, Smith told the Washington Post this past October.

“We increased the height of the fence,” she said. “We decreased the depth of some of the pools. … One of the biggest projects was a smoke evacuation system in the [panda] house.”

“Then, of course, we’re going to get two young pandas here,” she added. “We want to make it fun.”

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To help the pandas acclimate to their new home, staff slowly introduced the pair to their indoor and outdoor habitats, as well as daily routines featuring training sessions, enrichment activities and a bamboo-heavy diet. By offering the bears verbal encouragement—and treats like carrots and apples—keepers can train them to participate in their own medical care: for example, by teaching the animals to hold out a paw for a blood draw or stand up on cue for a visual examination of the torso and legs.

As James Steeil, a supervisory veterinarian at NZCBI, told Smithsonian last May, the pandas decide “for themselves” when they are ready to meet the public. “Some bears do it faster than others,” he said. “Others do it slower, and that’s OK.”

Visitors hoping to welcome the pandas in person must reserve free entry passes online. To mark the species’ much-anticipated return to Washington, NZCBI will host a two-week District of Panda Party, with offerings ranging from a Lunar New Year event to a screening of the movie Kung Fu Panda. For those unable to make it to Washington, the Giant Panda Cam, a feed of 40 cameras spread out across the animals’ habitat, will broadcast live between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. Eastern. After 7 p.m., the day’s recording will repeat.

Bao Li, the boisterous male, has strong links to the nation’s capital. His mother, Bao Bao, was born at NZCBI in 2013, and his grandparents Mei Xiang and Tian Tian lived in Washington for 23 years. As Thompson told Smithsonian last May, she is eager to see “if Bao Li is anything like his mom,” whom the New Yorker described as “delicate and independent.” More recently, Thompson told NBC’s “Today” that Bao Li “really does look like his granddad, and also just kind of his behavior and his sweetness, he gets from his grandpa.”

The history of pandas in Washington dates back to February 1972, when Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai offered to gift pandas to the U.S. during a conversation with first lady Pat Nixon. Two pandas, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, arrived in town that April, attracting more than one million visitors in their first month on view. Though Zoo staff encouraged the pair to breed, none of their cubs survived longer than a few days. Ling-Ling died suddenly in 1992, while Hsing-Hsing was euthanized after suffering from kidney disease in 1999.

The Panda House stood empty for just over a year, until the arrival of Mei Xiang and Tian Tian in December 2000. After natural breeding efforts repeatedly failed, scientists turned to artificial insemination. Mei Xiang gave birth to Tai Shan, NZCBI’s first cub to survive infancy, in July 2005. Two more healthy cubs, Bao Bao and Bei Bei, followed in August 2013 and August 2015, respectively. Five years later, in August 2020, Mei Xiang—by then considered of “advanced maternal age” and unlikely to give birth to a healthy cub, according to a statement—surprised keepers by doing just that. At 22, she became the oldest panda to give birth in the U.S. and the second-oldest documented in the world. Her cub, christened Xiao Qi Ji, or “little miracle,” captivated people worldwide, who followed his every move via the Giant Panda Cam.

With Bao Li and Qing Bao’s debut, a new era of “pandamonium” is set to begin. As an excited young visitor who got a sneak peek at the bears told “Today,” “I like that they’re big. They look fluffy. I want to squeeze them.” At a press conference on Friday, Smith echoed this sentiment, saying, “I’ve been working with pandas for almost 20 years. … One day, I suspect I’ll go out, look at a panda and the magic will wear off, but it never does. It never has.”