Profiles

Lights, camera... panda!

By Huang Zhiling (China Daily)
Updated: 2010-06-11 07:36

Zhou Mengqi, a panda lover, takes photos of a giant panda. [PROVIDED TO CHINA DAILY]

CHENGDU - Zhou Mengqi arrived at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in the northern suburbs of Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, at 8:30 am on Monday.

Zhou, who accompanied two guests from Hong Kong to the base, was lucky to see six little pandas having bamboo and bamboo shoots breakfast in the enclosure outside their dens.

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"It was the first time I had seen so many pandas feasting on their breakfast together. The guests and I were excited and took lots of pictures," he told China Daily.

An official with the Chengdu people's congress, Zhou does not know how many times he has visited the base. His love for the cuddly bears has prompted him to advise many visitors from outside the city to visit the base and volunteer to be their guide.

Whenever he visits the pandas, he brings his camera. Despite his busy routine, Zhou has taken more than 10,000 photographs of pandas in his spare time. Many of them have been included in his new picture album "China's Giant Panda."

Published by the Sichuan Fine Arts Publishing House, the 164-page album has been well received by both photographers and panda experts.

Wang Dajun, a top photographer of natural scenery in the country, commented: "Pandas remind many of quiet and motionless creatures. But in Zhou Mengqi's album, one can see pandas roll about, walk on snow, hold a tree in an upside-down posture, and slide down a tree as if it were a sliding board. He must have made painstaking efforts to take the pictures."

Zhang Hemin, chief of the Wolong Nature Reserve Administrative Bureau, told China Daily that Zhou's album is the best he has ever seen because the album with exquisite pictures also gives a detailed introduction to the history and status of pandas, a chronicle of all the major events pertaining to pandas, and major panda reserves.

"To us researchers, it is like a popular science book," he said.

Together with professor Hu Jinchu of the school of life science of China West Normal University, and Zhang Zhihe, chief of the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding, Zhang Hemin is one of the three advisers of Zhou's picture album China's Giant Panda. As China's three best-known panda experts, they have read the text in the album.

Zhou, now 57, first showed his love of pandas when he was 6. When his mother took him to the Baihuatan Zoo, the kindergarten child was impressed by two pandas climbing a scaling ladder and frolicking leisurely.

"I was so interested in them that I left the panda hall only after my mother kept asking me to comply," he said.

After he attended primary school, Zhou kept drawing pictures of pandas. He was 11 when his first picture of a panda eating bamboo was included in the school art exhibition.

Zhou joined the army in 1970. Because he was good at drawing, he was sent to Kunming, capital of Yunnan province, for one month to learn how to take photographs. "Photography has been part of my life ever since," he said.

But he did not see pandas until he was demobilized from the army and worked in the Chengdu Publishing House in 1989, as pandas are found in only Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces.

As a panda often sleeps for two and three hours after eating, it takes time to find pandas moving in different postures.

In the wee hours of July 26, 1992, a panda cub was born in the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. As it was the same day of the opening ceremony of the 25th Olympics in Barcelona, Juan Antonio Samaranch, president of the International Olympic Committee, named the cub "Kobe".

When Kobe was one month old, Zhou visited its den where it was sleeping with its mother. After he had waited for more than half an hour, the mother suddenly sat up and held Kobe tightly, facing Zhou calmly. Zhou lost no time to take a nice picture of the duo.

The photo, entitled "Affection of the Mother for the Cub", became Zhou's first picture included in a national photo exhibition.

For Zhou, taking pictures of pandas is a process of enjoying beauty and feeling other people's love for pandas.

He stayed in the Wolong Nature Reserve in Wenchuan county, Sichuan, during the National Day holiday in October 1995. He was fortunate to capture images of pandas frolicking on the ground, climbing trees or moving in other different postures. His picture of a panda holding a tree in an upside-down posture in the picture album China's Giant Panda was taken there.

Zhou, who was the former boss of the Chengdu Newspaper Publishing Group, worked in the publicity department of the Chengdu committee of the Communist Party of China for 16 years.

He had worked as the executive director of the department for four years before he got the present job in Chengdu people's congress in December 2007 out of his own insistence.

"It was due to my love for pandas that I made the decision, because working in the congress meant more time with pandas," Zhou said.