An entire chapter of the book is devoted to individual pandas and their personalities. Readers meet Dai Li, a three-legged panda whose life is a story of resilience, and the young panda Qiao Yi, whose rescue is told in the book and who is known as the "little fairy" of the giant panda world. There's also the story of how villagers in Foping came together to help save a young cub.
Then there's Tao Tao, born on August 3, 2010, the first cub ever delivered at a wild training base in Wolong without any help from humans. Raised in semi-wild conditions by his mother, Cao Cao, and trainers dressed in full panda costumes, he was released into the Liziping Nature Reserve on October 11, 2012, and is widely considered the first captive-born panda successfully returned to the wild.
The bigger story is the species' comeback. China's first national survey, carried out between 1974 and 1977, counted 2,459 wild pandas, but by the second survey, between 1985 and 1988, that number had dropped to 1,114. Decades of anti-poaching enforcement and expanding forest reserves turned things around, and the 2014 survey found 1,864 pandas in the wild, a rise of nearly 17% in ten years. In 2016, the International Union for Conservation of Nature moved the giant panda from "endangered" to "vulnerable," and Chinese authorities followed with their own reclassification in July 2021.
Alongside the photographs, the book highlights the people behind that progress, from conservationists to international partners, and the difficult, painstaking work of returning pandas to the wild. It's a reminder that every one of these famous faces depends on a team of people determined to keep them thriving for generations to come.
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