About Chongqing Zoo

Chongqing Zoo

Chongqing Zoo is a municipal zoo at Yangjiaping in Jiulongpo District, Chongqing, about eight kilometres southwest of the city centre. Preparations began in August 1953 under the Chongqing Municipal Construction Bureau, the park opened as Xiqu, or Western, Park on 24 January 1955, and it was converted to a zoo from 1958 before taking its present name. Covering about 45 hectares of hilly terrain, it is one of China's largest urban zoos and an important base for wildlife protection and research. It exhibits over 4,000 animals of more than 230 species, and it is best known internationally for its giant pandas: it now holds the largest number of captive giant pandas of any city zoo in China and hosts the national South China tiger breeding programme.

From Western Park to City Zoo

The zoo's timeline reflects the building of public institutions in the early People's Republic. Groundwork started in 1953, and the site opened to the public on 24 January 1955 as Xiqu Park, a general western-suburbs park rather than a dedicated zoo. Conversion to zoological use began in 1958, the same year in which, by the zoo's own later accounts, its first Panda House was built. The park was subsequently renamed Chongqing Zoo. The hilly Yangjiaping site, on Xijiao Road in Jiulongpo District, gave the zoo a landscaped character of green hills, water and mature trees that visitors still remark on. Across eight functional divisions described in Chinese reference sources — bird, primate, herbivore, raptor and central leisure areas among them — more than twenty animal venues were developed, including Tiger Hill, Bear Hill, the Gorilla House, Deer Park, Kangaroo Park, the Elephant House, the Panda House, the Goldfish House and Birds Paradise. That gradual conversion from a single park opening in 1955 to a full city zoo explains the layered layout visitors encounter today.

The Collection Across 45 Hectares

Reference and travel sources agree on the scale of the collection: more than 230 species and over 4,000 animals, with some Chinese sources counting more than 240 species and about 4,200 animals. The rare animals consistently named include giant pandas, red pandas, South China tigers, white tigers, African and Asian elephants, golden monkeys, takin, argali, golden cats and clouded leopards. Herbivores, amphibians, birds and fish fill out the divisions beyond the headline mammals. The zoo began, by one retrospective account, with an initial exhibit of only 60 animals of 11 species; its growth to more than 260 species in some recent counts and nearly 3.6 million visitors a year in the same account illustrates the expansion of a municipal collection over seven decades. Because Chongqing is a mountain city, enclosures step up and down slopes rather than across flat ground, and the Panda House, Tiger Hill and Bear Hill use that terrain as part of their design. The result is a large urban zoo whose collection breadth — primates, big cats, elephants, birds and fish — matches the classic comprehensive model of the Chinese city zoo.

The Giant Pandas Arrive

Chongqing's defining animal story began in the early 1960s. In interviews marking sixty years of panda keeping, the zoo's panda technical supervisor Yin Yanqiang recalled that Chongqing Zoo was established in 1955 as Xiqu Park and received its first giant panda in the early 1960s: a wild panda rescued by staff in Pingwu, Sichuan. Chongqing and Sichuan were then part of the same regional world — Chongqing was administered within Sichuan for much of this period — and rescued Sichuan pandas repeatedly found a home at the zoo. Panda keeping therefore started as rescue work. Breeding came later and proved difficult: keepers recall that the zoo began attempting to breed giant pandas in the 1980s, that the first cub was successfully bred in 1985, and that no cubs had survived before that breakthrough. In the 1990s the use of incubators, controlling temperature and humidity for newborn cubs, solved persistent early-survival problems. Those three stages — rescue in the 1960s, first surviving captive breeding in 1985, and incubator-assisted rearing in the 1990s — form the technical foundation on which the zoo's modern panda programme was built.

Xin Xing, the World's Oldest Captive Panda

No individual animal is more closely associated with Chongqing Zoo than Xin Xing, also rendered Xinxing. Born in the wild in Baoxing County, Ya'an, Sichuan, in August 1982 — Baoxing being the county where the French missionary and naturalist Armand David first brought the giant panda to scientific attention in 1869 — she was brought to Chongqing Zoo at about one year old, in June 1983. In 1988 she was exhibited at the Winter Olympics in Calgary, Canada, attracting over one million visitors. She had her first cub in 1992 after mating with Chuanchuan from Shanghai Zoo. By the time she turned 37 in August 2019, she was recognised as the world's oldest captive giant panda, weighed 98 kilograms on a daily diet reported as 30 kilograms of bamboo shoots, half a kilogram of bamboo leaves, a kilogram of apples and 70 grams of refined feed, and was matriarch of a family counted at 137 descendants, later reported at more than 150, spread across China and more than twenty countries and regions including the United States, Canada and Japan. Her son Lingling contributed to natural-mating techniques after exchange to Sichuan. Xin Xing died at noon on 8 December 2020, aged 38, after symptoms including drowsiness and loss of appetite from 21 October; examination attributed her death to old age and multiple organ failure. Her longevity, equivalent to more than 110 human years, remains a benchmark in captive panda care.

A Leading City-Zoo Breeding Programme

After 2000, in the words of the zoo's researchers, Chongqing's panda breeding entered a fast lane. The zoo became one of the few city zoos in China capable of independently breeding pandas, achieving not only single births but twins and triplets. Counts published in 2023 and 2024 put its record at 31 or 32 panda births or litters, including 13 sets of twins and one set of triplets, and its resident population at 22 to 23 pandas — the largest of any city zoo in China, ahead of larger national breeding centres only if those specialist bases are counted separately. The population combines animals bred in-house, animals exchanged with Sichuan institutions and animals held under cooperative breeding programmes. Individual births illustrate the programme's continuity: Ershun, Xin Xing's granddaughter, was born at the zoo in August 2007; on 23 June 2019 two mothers, Lanxiang and Mangzai, gave birth to twin pairs on the same day, the cubs later named Shuangshuang, Chongchong, Xixi and Qingqing; Mangzai's male cub born on 6 July 2023 weighed 191 grams, the heaviest recorded at the zoo; and on 28 June 2024 the panda Haoqi gave birth to a new cub. Twin-rearing technique, refined since Ya Ya's twins in 2006, when keepers used a mother's distraction to swap cubs for hand-rearing, underpins those results.

The Panda House and Its Expansions

The physical home of the programme has grown with it. Zoo accounts describe a Panda House first built in 1958, expanded in 1960, rebuilt and expanded again from 1988, with the present Panda House built in 1989 on the basis of the original Panda Cave and covering about two hectares in some descriptions. After three expansions the panda pavilion now covers nearly 20,000 square metres and is described as one of China's earliest panda breeding bases. Multiple enclosures allow the large resident population to be viewed in groups, and visitor reviews consistently identify the panda enclosure as the highlight of a visit, with crowds gathering at whichever enclosure holds the most active animals. The expansion history matters because it tracks the shift in purpose: a single mid-century panda house for rescued animals became, by the twenty-first century, a breeding complex sized for more than twenty pandas, nursery care for twins and triplets, and the daily public display that makes Chongqing a principal place to see pandas outside Sichuan's specialist bases.

South China Tigers and Wider Conservation Work

Chongqing Zoo's second national responsibility is the South China tiger. The zoo hosts the population base of the National South China Tiger Breeding Center, charged with continuing the captive population of China's own critically endangered tiger subspecies. That work is slow by nature: in September 2010 the zoo's technical team successfully bred South China tigers again, breaking a gap of nearly twenty-five years without a South China tiger birth at the zoo. The subspecies survives only in captivity, with fewer than one hundred individuals cited in recent zoo interpretation, which gives a city zoo's studbook and breeding work a significance beyond its gates. Beyond tigers and pandas, the zoo functions as a general wildlife-protection and research base for Chongqing, holding red pandas and golden monkeys among its nationally protected species and presenting its conservation role to millions of urban visitors who would otherwise have no contact with these animals. Its science-popularisation areas and children's facilities are part of the same municipal mission: a big-city zoo as the region's front door to wildlife protection.

Visiting Chongqing Zoo

The zoo sits at Yangjiaping on Xijiao Road, Jiulongpo District, about eight kilometres from the city centre, and is reached easily by Chongqing's metro and bus network. A typical visitor route in published guides runs from the Panda House through the herbivore and primate areas to Tiger Hill, the Leopard House, Bear Hill, the Puma House and the Gorilla House toward the West Gate. Visitors should allow extra time for the pandas: with more than twenty resident giant pandas, Chongqing offers one of the most reliable panda-viewing experiences in China, and mornings, when pandas are most active and feeding, draw the largest crowds. Facilities described in park sources include a children's paradise, an open-air stage, a reading room, restaurants and a tea garden within the grounds, reflecting the site's origin as a general park. At 45 hectares the zoo is walkable in a day, but its hills make comfortable footwear advisable. For travellers combining Chongqing's urban sights with wildlife, the zoo pairs naturally with the city's mountain-city scenery as its green, animal-filled counterpart.

Standing Among China's City Zoos

Chongqing Zoo's reputation rests on a specific and verifiable claim: among China's municipal zoos, as distinct from national breeding bases and safari parks, it keeps and breeds more giant pandas than any other, and it carries a national breeding responsibility for the South China tiger. That standing grew from ordinary municipal beginnings — a western park opened in 1955, a first rescued panda in the early 1960s, a first surviving bred cub only in 1985 — which makes the present population of more than twenty pandas a story of accumulated husbandry rather than a single founding endowment. Xin Xing's thirty-seven years at the zoo, her Calgary appearance in 1988 and her more than 150 descendants give that story a single recognisable face known worldwide. With over 4,000 animals of more than 230 species across 45 hectares, Chongqing Zoo remains both a comprehensive city zoo for its residents and, for panda specialists and visitors alike, one of the essential institutions in the captive history of China's most famous animal.