About Nanning Zoo

Nanning Zoo

The Only Large-Scale Professional Zoo in Guangxi

Nanning Zoo, at 73 Daxue East Road in Xixiangtang District, Nanning, Guangxi, is the only large-scale professional zoo in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. Its Chinese name is Nanning Dongwuyuan. Founded in 1973 and opened to the public in 1975, it stands in the western suburb of the city, in an area historically called Shiliting or Wuliting, and it is also sometimes known as Xijiao Park, the western suburbs park. That double identity, zoo and park, runs through everything about the place. Garden experts have praised it as a zoo within a botanical garden, for its banyans, lakes and subtropical planting, and visitors experience animal houses set inside mature green grounds rather than a bare exhibition yard.

The zoo covers 39.1 hectares, of which 31.1 hectares are land and 8 hectares are water, and it receives more than one million visitors a year. It is rated a national 4A-level scenic area, the second-highest grade in China's tourism rating system. Its stated functions combine wild animal viewing with animal protection, breeding, management and scientific research, and travel summaries add display, reproduction, science education and leisure tourism. For a region as biodiverse as Guangxi, on China's southern border with Vietnam and rich in limestone karst wildlife, a serious regional zoo carries responsibilities beyond entertainment, and Nanning's history shows it gradually acquiring them.

Founded in 1973, Opened in 1975, Expanded to 2003

The zoo was founded in 1973 and officially opened to the public in 1975. Its early park covered the same broad footprint of 39.1 hectares that it retains today. An expansion of the zoo began in 1995 and was completed in 2003, a period that modernised its animal areas and visitor facilities. In November 2017 the zoo won the honour of being named a national civilised unit, a Chinese designation recognising standards of public service and management. During the Covid period it announced that, from its reopening in 2020 until 31 December 2020, medical workers and their parents, spouses and children could enter free with valid certificates, a gesture recorded in its summaries and typical of the civic role Chinese municipal zoos were asked to play.

Later additions changed the zoo's scale again. In October 2008 it invested heavily in a theme amusement park with large rides, described as including Guangxi's first roller coaster, making it the only themed amusement park of its kind in Nanning alongside the animal areas. In November 2019 a new giant panda pavilion opened. A zoo founded in the 1970s as a municipal animal collection thus became, by the 2010s, a combined zoological, botanical and leisure destination receiving over a million visitors a year, while still retaining its original park landscape of lakes and banyans as the frame for everything added since.

More Than 2,500 Animals of Some 250 Species

Nanning Zoo keeps more than 2,500 animals, with some current travel summaries giving over 2,600 animals, of some 250 species. The range named across its guides is wide: Asian and African elephants, giraffes, Siberian tigers, African lions, hippopotamuses, hornbills, kangaroos, penguins, Yangtze alligators, sea lions and dolphins, together with zebras, rhinoceroses, white tigers, camels, red pandas, capybaras and many smaller species. The zoo is composed of more than thirty named areas and houses, including a dolphinarium, elephant hall, gibbon hall, Francois's leaf monkey house, giraffe house, penguin house, hippopotamus house, reptile house, hornbill house, kangaroo house and a waterfowl lake.

Zoo summaries make a more specific claim about population strength: that the park holds the largest artificially domesticated populations in China of gibbons, dolphins, rhinoceroses and hippopotamuses, and among the larger Chinese populations of black leaf monkeys, Asian elephants and sea lions. Such claims, made in the zoo's own descriptive material, point to a breeding and husbandry role that casual visitors rarely see. Maintaining a large, healthy social group of a difficult species over many years is a different achievement from displaying a single specimen, and it is in group species, primates above all, that Nanning's reputation principally rests.

A Primate Collection Led by Leaf Monkeys and Gibbons

The primate collection is the zoo's acknowledged speciality. Rare primates named in its guides include Francois's leaf monkeys, also called black leaf monkeys, silvered leaf monkeys, yellow-cheeked gibbons and hooded gibbons, alongside chimpanzees, red monkeys, ring-tailed lemurs and squirrel monkeys in visitor accounts. A detailed species list compiled by a visiting zoo enthusiast in January 2025 confirms the impression of a very primate-heavy zoo, with Francois's and Indochinese silvered langurs and buff-cheeked, pileated and white-cheeked gibbons kept in multiple groups, as well as douc langurs and other species in smaller numbers.

That emphasis has a regional logic. Guangxi's karst forests are a world stronghold of Francois's leaf monkey, a limestone specialist whose wild populations are fragmented and threatened, and southern China and neighbouring Vietnam are home to several gibbon species that are among the world's most endangered primates. A Guangxi zoo that breeds leaf monkeys and gibbons well is working with the fauna of its own hills. The Francois's leaf monkey house is one of the zoo's named signature buildings, and black leaf monkeys appear in almost every account of the zoo, from official summaries to independent visitor lists, as its characteristic animals.

Elephants, Big Cats and the Dolphinarium

The Terrestrial Animal Protection Center, in the central part of the zoo, is described as able to accommodate 4,000 people at a time, and its elephant performances have long been among the zoo's most popular attractions, with Asian and African elephants both kept. The big cat areas hold Siberian, also called Northeast, tigers and African lions, and white tigers are highlighted in itineraries. Giraffes, which visitors can feed on popular routes, hippos, rhinos and zebras complete the classic large-mammal circuit that most families expect of a major city zoo, and Nanning provides it within its original lakeside park layout.

The Dolphinarium, built in 2002 for an investment of 20 million yuan, was the first dolphin performance venue in south-west China. Zoo summaries describe a performance hall able to accommodate more than 2,000 spectators, hosting dolphin and sea lion shows. Records of the zoo's cetaceans note bottlenose dolphins and an Indo-Pacific humpback dolphin named Lao Bai, rescued in 2007, whose jaw injury in 2013 and subsequent care later drew national media attention and advocacy. That episode illustrates the changing expectations placed on Chinese zoos in the twenty-first century: marine mammal display that was a source of pride in 2002 is now also judged by welfare and sanctuary standards, and Nanning's animals have been part of that national conversation.

The Giant Panda Pavilion of 2019

The giant panda pavilion, opened in November 2019, covers 8,360 square metres and is itself shaped like a giant panda, a piece of playful architecture that travel guides single out as the zoo's star attraction. Giant pandas are loaned within China under strict conditions and are only placed with zoos able to meet demanding standards of housing, diet and veterinary care, so the arrival of a purpose-built panda pavilion marked Nanning's standing as a mature institution. The pavilion's scale, larger than many entire animal houses of the zoo's early decades, also shows how visitor expectations had changed by 2019: a flagship species required a flagship building, designed to be photographed as well as to house bears.

Pandas also changed the zoo's visitor geography. Itineraries for Nanning now routinely lead with the panda pavilion, then route visitors through the primate area, the dolphinarium, the big cats and the elephants. For Guangxi residents, Nanning offers the region's only opportunity to see giant pandas without travelling to Sichuan or another major centre. In a zoo whose fame previously rested on primates and elephants, the panda pavilion added a national symbol to a regional collection, and its panda-shaped roofline has become the image most associated with the modern zoo.

Conservation News: The Hainan Night Heron

The zoo's most remarkable conservation story concerns one of the world's rarest birds. The Hainan night heron, also called the white-eared night heron, Gorsachius magnificus, was first described from Wuzhishan on Hainan Island in 1899, is endemic to southern China with a record in northern Vietnam, and has been classified as Endangered, having earlier been treated as Critically Endangered. Population estimates published in 2009 put it at only about 350 to 1,500 birds worldwide, and it has been listed among the thirty most endangered birds in the world. Almost entirely nocturnal and secretive, it was once thought extinct and is notoriously difficult to observe in the wild.

Nanning Zoo entered that story through rescue. Scientific reporting records that in 2003 the zoo received three juvenile white-eared night herons, two rescued from a reservoir in Heng County about fifty kilometres east of Nanning and another from a forest farm reservoir north of the city, and that a further rescued juvenile was passed to the zoo in 2005. The clean-file summary of the zoo records that it made conservation news by successfully breeding the Hainan night heron in 2009. Captive breeding of a species so rare, and so poorly known ecologically, is a significant achievement, and it placed a municipal zoo in Guangxi inside one of the most closely watched bird conservation efforts in China, alongside the work of field researchers in Guangxi, Guangdong, Hainan and other southern provinces.

A Zoo Within a Botanical Garden

Guides return repeatedly to the zoo's planting. Banyans and lake scenery frame the animal houses, and plant lists in travel accounts name elegant banyan, weeping banyan, guava, betel nut and needle palm among the subtropical species in its ecological garden areas, with scenic features such as Sanhe Pavilion and Sanbu Bridge. Eight hectares of water, in waterfowl lakes and ponds, give the zoo a spaciousness that its 39.1 hectares might not otherwise suggest. Shade is not a trivial amenity in Nanning's hot, humid climate; a zoo that is also a mature subtropical garden is simply more comfortable, for animals and visitors alike, through the long southern summer.

That garden character also softens the zoo's later additions. A roller coaster and a panda-shaped pavilion could overwhelm a plainer site, but within large green grounds they sit as features in a park. The zoo's dual description in sources, as both the largest zoo in Guangxi and the largest theme park in Nanning, captures an institution that has accumulated functions over fifty years: municipal menagerie, breeding centre, botanical park, amusement destination and conservation participant. Managing those identities together is the continuing task of its staff, and the balance shifts with public expectations, as the debate over dolphin keeping shows.

Visiting Nanning Zoo Today

For visitors, the zoo is a full-day destination in western Nanning, reached at 73 Daxue East Road in Xixiangtang District. Travel platforms describe a ticket of around fifty yuan in recent guides, more than a million visitors a year, and a recommended route that takes in the panda pavilion, the primate areas, the dolphin and sea lion performances, the elephants and big cats, and the bird and reptile areas, with amusement rides and, in season, water attractions alongside. Families from across Guangxi form its core audience, since no comparable collection exists elsewhere in the region.

Half a century after its founding in 1973, Nanning Zoo's significance is best stated plainly. It is Guangxi's principal window on the world's animals, the region's largest centre for primate keeping and breeding, the home since 2019 of a landmark giant panda pavilion, and a participant, through the Hainan night heron, in the conservation of one of the world's most endangered birds. Its banyan-shaded lakes remind visitors that it began as a park and remains one. Anyone seeking to understand how a Chinese regional zoo has grown, layer by layer, from a 1970s municipal collection into a modern zoological institution will find the whole story legible in a single visit to Daxue East Road.