Jakarta Globe – AFP, Jul 06, 2014
Yuan Zai, right, the first Taiwan-born baby panda, and her mother Yuan Yuan enjoy cake, during the celebration of her first birthday at the Taipei City Zoo on Sunday. (AFP Photo/Mandy Cheng) |
Taipei.
Thousands braved the summer heat Sunday to celebrate the first birthday of Yuan
Zai, the first giant panda cub born in Taiwan, who has attracted hundreds of
thousands of visitors in six months.
Around
3,000 people joined a 10-kilometer run which was part of a series of programs
marking the birthday.
Visitors,
many of them children with parents, cheered Yuan Zai when she was presented
with a birthday cake — made of apples, pineapples, carrots and buns and
prepared by the zookeepers.
The main
attraction was when the cub grabbed different cards in “Zhua Zhou,” a
traditional crawling game for one-year-old babies in many Chinese communities.
The first
card or object to be grabbed indicates a future career path or interest,
according to custom.
Yuan Zai
initially picked up the card for painter, among a variety of others.
The cub
made her public debut in January and since then the exhibition centre at Taipei
Zoo has often been swamped with fans.
In the six
months to June 2.4 million people visited the zoo, about a 50 percent rise over
the same period of 2013.
Yuan Zai
was delivered on July 6 last year following a series of artificial insemination
sessions because her parents — Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan — failed to conceive
naturally.
She weighed
180 grams at birth but now tips the scales at around 34 kilograms.
Mother and
daughter were reunited for the first time on August 13, a meeting that saw the
giant panda licking and cuddling her baby before they fell asleep together
inside a cage.
Tuan Tuan
and Yuan Yuan, whose names mean “reunion” in Chinese, were given to Taiwan by
China in December 2008 and have become star attractions at Taipei Zoo, as well
as a symbol of warming ties between the former bitter rivals.
Fewer than
1,600 pandas remain in the wild, mainly in China’s Sichuan province, with a
further 300 in captivity around the world.
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