The Pandas

Chengdu recently placed fourth on a list of most livable cities in China, but it obviously did not face tough competition. From the sky, the capital of Sichuan is an incoherent sprawl of cheap medium-rise buildings. On the ground it becomes a pointless mess of endless impossible-to-walk avenues packed full of honking cars stuck in perpetual traffic. We can only hope this will improve in a year or two, when the embryonic public transport is augmented with a six-lines subway network. Every single city we visited  in China is currently building six subway lines or more.

Worst of all is the brown smog perpetually covering the city. China has some of the world's largest coal reserves, a huge surplus of cheap labour and timid work-safety laws. This combination makes coal-mining for electricity production economically irresistible. In 2005, China built enough power plants to power the UK. In 2006, enough to power France. After that we run out of suitable countries for comparison purposes, but China's growth in energy demand shows no signs of abating. As a result, the country recently overtook the US to become the world's biggest emitter of greenhouse gases, and that was a tough trophy to earn.

In huge parts of China, it is only possible to see the sun by boarding an airliner. Every city we visited smelled terrible, and every breath felt like sandpaper inside our lungs. I had read that less than 10% of chinese urban residents breathed air that would be considered safe by western standards, but I am positive I never went near any of them. On the other hand, a walk through Chengdu in the evening does prove one thing: you can make a city very lively at night, if you have an endless supply of coal and a devil-may-care approach to lung cancer.

Anyway, we didn't come to Chengdu for the city, but to meet China's cutest urban residents: the fifty giant pandas of Chengdu's Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. They really are urban residents: the huge park-like facility used to be well outside the suburbs, but Chengdu has grown as fast as most other Chinese cities, and the park now lies somewhere between its third and fourth ring roads. However, you could never tell that from the inside. We spent hours gawking at the sleepy-eyed teddy bears who fill their busy days with equal shares of bamboo eating and napping. They seemed very happy, and if I believed in reincarnation I would certainly look forward to coming back to Earth as a panda. If anything, it would help the species: only about 1500 pandas survive in the wild, and captive breeding has only recently become successful. Looking cute may have become a huge asset for survival in the 21st century, yet the species' future is far from certain.

We spent the afternoon around Wenshu monastery, a historic-looking neighborhood of shops, dim sum parlors and tea-houses where people like to relax and get their ears cleaned. It looked as though someone had taken my mental image of what China ought to look like and turned it into reality. So we roamed aimlessly in this small pocket of fresh air, sheltered for a while from the bustling but tedious metropolis threatening to swallow it all. Chengdu may be a soulless labyrinth and a biohazard overall, but it surely has high points.