When the facility was first built, it only housed six rescue pandas. Today, close to a hundred pandas are born in The Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding each year. This modern and world-class panda “daycare” uses the best and safest ways to increase their population, since female pandas only give birth to one cub every two years.

There are other panda bases in China, and some of them, like the Dujiangyan and Wolong bases are now accepting daily volunteers to help take care of pandas, cleaning and feeding them, and it’s probably the experience of a lifetime.