Pan Wenshi, 65, is now a professor at the College of Life Science of Beijing (Peking) University, acts as the director of the university's Giant Panda and Wildlife Conservation Research Center, and is a member of the National Committee of the CPPCC. Under his leadership, the giant panda research project has won the First Prize for Scientific and Technological Progress of the State Science and Technology Commission, the Award for Special Scientific Achievement of the US Giant Panda Fund, and the Ford Motor Conservation and Environmental Grants.
On a snowy day in March 1985, with heavy packs on their shoulders, Pan Wenshi and three of his students went to the south side of the Qinling Mountains to start their study of the giant panda. During the following years, he has led his students deep into the high, steep mountains of Shaanxi and Sichuan provinces many times. There, they have conducted elaborate research on the behavior, living environment, and genetics of the giant panda. They have made a noted contribution to the protection of the species, and in return, they have been recognized worldwide as the authoritative specialists in the research of giant pandas.
Over the past years, more and more postgraduates have joined in the research project led by him, and have been part of a vigorous and passionate team. Out of an almost holy sense of responsibility, the team members have overcome various kinds of difficulties, such as strong feelings of solitude, and have trudged through wild mountains all year round. In the chilly winter, they have mixed potatoes and rice, boiling them in a big pot, making their food for the next several days. Sometimes, with heavy equipment on their backs, they have had to cross both mountains and rivers to follow the giant pandas that carry radio-tracking tags. In the winters of 1994 and 1996, Pan Wenshi and his team had to live like cavemen for five months, deep in the snow-covered forests, to monitor and record the conditions of several baby giant pandas.
"Every time I recall the past years," Pan Wenshi said, "a feeling of slight solemnness hits me. The more we know about the adverse situation the giant panda faces, the more we feel we are responsible for protecting the species. It is the kind of devotion that encourages us to trudge through the mountains and valleys of the Qinling Mountains day after day, year after year."
In 1996, Pan Wenshi started another research project on the white-headed langur in order to protect the endangered species.
One day in December of the same year, Pan Wenshi and his students, all wearing battle fatigues, got to a discarded military camp in Banli Township, Chongzuo County in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. There, they were lucky enough to find tap water and electricity. What made them feel even luckier was finding white-headed langurs on the limestone cliffs near their camp. Pan Wenshi knew they had finally reached the right place. Before this, they had searched across Guangxi for more than three months.
The white-headed langur likes to inhabit caves on steep, limestone cliffs. Every morning, Pan Wenshi and his students headed respectively for different cliffs to observe these animals with telescopes and gather statistics. From then on, until March 1998, they monitored 147 white-headed langurs from 16 groups living within the eight-square-kilometer domain around the camp. Later, they came to gather statistics only once every three months. "Up to February of this year, we had found a total of 212 langurs from 20 groups," Pan Wenshi told me excitedly. "It is really moving."
On the outer wall of the research base in Chongzuo County is a mural drawn by a female painter from Beijing and some of Pan Wenshi's students. The mural vividly depicts dozens of endangered species, including the giant panda, the white-headed langur, the Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin, the chimpanzee, the macaw, the polar bear, and the penguin, against a background composed of several human faces, deforested lands, fuming chimneys, and green mountains and seas. "I think that the troubled living conditions of wild animals are a result of mankind's development of agricultural and industrial civilizations over the past thousands of years," Pan Wenshi said. "Today, mankind is able to create a new kind of civilization to rescue these animals from their difficult situations, and thus realize a harmonious co-existence between man and nature. I call this civilization the Ecological Civilization. This mural perfectly expresses my viewpoints." Pan Wenshi has devoted decades of painstaking effort to research the giant panda and the white-headed langur. He told us he was pleased to see the dawning of the first Ecological Civilization in Chongzuo County.
(China Pictorial May 16, 2003)
