Three of the District’s cutest, furriest, and most famous residents are leaving D.C. today. Giant pandas Mei Xiang, Tian Tian, and Xiao Qi Ji have begun their journey from the Smithsonian’s National Zoo to Chengdu, China.
There will be no teary, public goodbye for the beloved animals, however. The pandas are scheduled to be loaded into large metal crates, then lifted onto a FedEx truck before the zoo opens at 10 a.m. today. From there, they will be taken to Dulles International Airport and loaded onto a FedEx Boeing 777 freight plane.
It’s unclear if the zoo will be able to get another pair of pandas from China. The cute creatures have been a fixture in D.C. for the past half-century, ever since Beijing sent the first pair here as a diplomatic gesture during the Cold War. Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the zoo’s first panda couple, arrived following Richard Nixon’s historic visit to China in 1972.
Ling-Ling died in 1992 at age 23, while Hsing-Hsing lived until the ripe old age of 28, dying in 1999.
Tian Tian and Mei Xiang arrived in the District in 2000 on a 10-year loan, at a cost of $1 million per year. Since then, the loan agreement was extended three times. The pair had several cubs, including Xiao Qi Ji, who was a pandemic baby born in August 2020.
Generations of D.C.-area kids have grown up obsessed with pandas. On a recent morning before the animals’ departure, a third-grade class from a nearby D.C. public school was observing and drawing the pandas at the zoo during a...
Professional rivalry and office politics were the driving forces behind the "false" sexual harassment and conversion allegations levelled against Tata Consulting Services (TCS) employee Raza Rafiq...