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This was meant to be an exciting and exotic summer vacation for Huang Chung Ying, a graduate student from Taiwan University, and it did not disappoint. She attended a special panda camp, called "knowing and loving the panda."

"This is the first time in my life that I've been so close to them," said 24-year-old Huang, an urban planning major.

She said she didn't know pandas could have cataracts, and that the "seemingly gentle panda can also be very ferocious."

Now she knows.

Huang is a member of the Zoological Society of Taipei, but she had never had a chance to see a real panda until this summer camp, initiated by Macao Society for Panda Conservation (MSPC).

Six students from Guangdong, Taiwan and Macao spent five days observing pandas, mainly at the Fuzhou Giant Panda Research Centre.

The panda is such a loveable creature, and has long been taken in China as a symbol of peace and amity. The mainland announced that it would offer the local Taiwan people a pair of pandas during Kuomingtang chief Lien Chan's historic visit to the Chinese mainland.

Work is underway to select the best pair.

Professor Ho Wai Tim, president of MSPC, brought her 3-year-old girl Ho Si Ng along. Little Ho took out 3,000 yuan (US$375) of her pocket money to adopt a panda from the Fuzhou centre.

"She has taken the panda as her little sister, calling it Sisi, after her own given name," Ho said of her daughter.

Apart from its charmingly naive physical features, Ho noted her daughter, like many other children, knows very little about pandas, and about how much scientists and panda keepers have devoted to preserving this endangered species. Most children in Taiwan and Macao have only seen a panda on TV.

"It might sound cliched, but, without man's honest efforts, the panda cannot survive. Our children should know about it," Ho said.

At the Fuzhou centre, the students met the country's most celebrated panda grandma Panpan, the mascot of the 11th Asian Games in Beijing in 1990.

Panpan turned 25 on April 27 this year, and is enjoying a good old age. She was rescued from a river in 1984 in southwest Wolong, Sichuan, when all her favourite food, bamboo, perished. For her protection, Panpan was immediately transferred to the Fuzhou Centre.

Panpan was only 4 when she was sent to the centre, and was scared of humans and refused to eat anything, Chen Xiaoling, the panda's caretaker at the time, recalled.

Chen thus built a shelter near the panda, who was known then as Bass, named after the place she was found. Chen spent almost every hour with her, helping her adjust to the new environment, hot and humid, which contrasted sharply to her cold, dry birthplace.

Spending nearly 10 years with her, Chen even delayed her wedding date for Bass and she believes that she was Bass' best friend.

"I could sit on her leg, or even play with her. To me, Bass was a well-bred lady, who rarely lost her temper," Chen said, adding that her experience with Bass has taught her a great deal about harmonious relationships between humans, nature and animals.

She noted that there are always some misunderstandings when domesticating pandas and other animals.

"Animal trainers would normally train them to do acrobatics only to entertain people. That's not harmony. Only when we humans treat animals sincerely as our friends can humans and animals coexist peacefully on this planet."

Chen still remembers the time when she forgot Bass' feelings during a performance in Fuzhou in the spring of 1988, Bass turned around and bit her arm.

"I was bathed in blood and almost gnawed to death by her," Chen recalled, rolling up her sleeves to show her right arm. "My right hand still has scars. I have undergone surgery twice. It was not Bass' fault, though. Bass was too tired after three performances, but I still forced her to do more. Certainly she was angry."

Chen's story is such an eye-opener. Chan Ka Lon, a graduate student of environment engineering from Macao, who had only seen a panda on TV before, admitted that he had no idea that a panda, a big size baby, could be so timid, yet so fractious at the same time.

"I thought what a panda keeper does is just feed it or something like that. Now I know how tough it is to protect and raise a panda," Chan said.

What Chan found most amazing during the five-day trip was how scientists conducted cataract surgery for Panpan in 2002, whose right eye had become blind in 1987. The blindness made the panda so agitated that she often attacked her keeper.

Before the cataract surgery, Professor Chen Yuncun of the Fuzhou Centre had done some research in the library. Disappointingly, no related research had been done either at home or abroad. Therefore, he recalled, "with doctors from the Southeast Ophthalmic Hospital and a military hospital in Fuzhou, we conducted the surgery based on our own observations and experiences."

It lasted one and a half hours, compared to three minutes for the cataract operation on humans.

After the operation, the centre assigned two zookeepers to look after her, and prevent her from scratching the right eye. The keepers barely went home during the first two crucial weeks. "Eventually, Panpan regained her sight and finally resumed her gymnastic performances through our intensive, meticulous care around the clock."

Now, Panpan no longer gives any public performances, because of her old age.

In May 2, 2005, the arrival of another pair of pandas, Fufu and Linyang, increased the number to five. Meanwhile, Fuzhou together with MSPC is planning to establish a blood bank for giant pandas. "A blood bank is necessary when a panda gets injured and needs an operation," Ho said. "Human beings have four blood types as designated A, B, AB, or O. We don't know how many or what kind of blood types pandas have, which makes it a little hard for the building of the blood bank. So a panda's blood type is a question that needs to be answered urgently."

Pandas are often described as "living fossils." "That's in a way an abstract concept," said Ho. "The more research we do, the better we know the panda. More contact, more love."

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