The Taipei Zoo’s adorable baby panda Yuanzai is one year old! The zoo kicked off a series of events early on Sunday morning to help her celebrate her big day.
A charity run began the day at 6am, and then the zoo opened its gates early at 7:30am.
Then at 8:00 in the morning, zoo keepers arranged a special event that’s often held in Taiwan when human children turn one year old. It’s called “zhua zhou” in Chinese, and it involves the child selecting his or her future profession. Usually, parents will spread out an array of items that symbolize different professions. But the Taipei Zoo opted instead for signs hanging on ropes, anchored down by bamboo cylinders.
Yuanzai made a beeline for the sign that said “artist”, but she ended up pulling the “engineer” sign right off the rope.” She also toyed with the signs for “flight attendant”, falling over at one point, before bypassing “doctor,” “athlete” and “movie star” to grab “teacher”. You can watch the entire video, which has been posted on the Radio Taiwan International Facebook page.
And of course, no birthday celebration would be complete without a birthday cake. The zoo commissioned a Japanese fruit and vegetable cake maker to create a special two-tiered frozen birthday cake for the little panda. The ingredients included her favorites – bamboo and steamed cornbread – as well as apples, pineapple and carrots.
Yuanzai began by pushing her cake over, and then gnawing on pieces of the frozen treat, much to the delight of the zoo goers.
The zoo reported on Sunday that at one year of age, Yuanzai has reached 34 kg. That’s 185 times her weight at birth, which was just 183.4 grams. Her handlers say that she has the intelligence of a 3-4 year old child. They say that while she already has all of her teeth, she will not be weaned off her mother’s milk until she is one and a half years old.