Lumi and Pyry, two pandas who have spent the past six years living in a zoo in central Finland, are heading back to China this year, more than eight years earlier than planned.
But both Finland and China insist that it isn’t a breakdown in “panda diplomacy.”
It simply turns out that pandas are pricey guests.
Hopes had been high when Lumi and Pyry, a female and male pair whose names mean Snow and Blizzard in Finnish, and who are known as Jin Baobao and Hua Bao in China, arrived in Finland in early 2018 on a 15-year loan.
Thousands of people came out to watch their convoy arrive, according to the Finnish news media. And about 280,000 people visited the Ahtari Zoo that year, Arja Valiaho, the zoo’s chief executive, said in a telephone interview on Thursday— more than double its visitor traffic in 2017.
The zoo, riding an initial wave of enthusiasm, spent about $9.5 million to build them a Panda House, Ms. Valiaho said. Then, it spent about $1.7 million a year on their upkeep, she said, including energy and maintenance costs and staff salaries, and about $223,000 in bamboo, shipped from the Netherlands. (Pandas eat 26 to 84 pounds of it every day.) Zoos also commonly pay an annual fee to China to host its pandas, although Ms. Valiaho declined to comment on whether it was part of the Ahtari Zoo’s arrangement.
But the zoo, which is at least a two-hour drive from any major Finnish city, has struggled to keep up its foot traffic and thus revenue from ticket sales, as Finland endured the coronavirus pandemic, steep inflation spurred in part by Russia’s war in Ukraine and a dip in domestic tourism.
And the panda pair just didn’t breed.
“We would have presumed that a panda cub here would have attracted people,” Ms. Valiaho said. “This year we didn’t even try for cubs.”
The zoo attracted only about 150,000 visitors last year, she said.
So after years of negotiation and requests for more state funding, the zoo decided that it had little choice but to return the pandas.
“Every time I leave work to go home, I go check on the pandas,” Ms. Valiaho said. “I’ll miss them dearly.”
When the zoo announced the pair’s return on Monday, Finland and China both emphasized that their diplomatic ties remained strong.
“This matter concerns the Ahtari Zoo,” Johanna Unha-Kaprali, a spokeswoman for Finland’s Foreign Ministry, wrote in an email, adding, “Finland upholds well-functioning relations with China.”
And Yiqing Zhang, a political attaché in China’s embassy in Helsinki, said in an email that “after friendly consultations, China and Finland have jointly made the decision to bring back the two giant pandas to China ahead of schedule.”
China has been moving in recent years to shore up its panda diplomacy after several departures from the United States raised questions about whether there was a bigger geopolitical significance. This year, it was announced that pandas were being sent from China to San Diego, San Francisco and Washington.
The Ahtari Zoo is certainly mourning the looming departure of two of its most famous residents.
It is also preparing Lumi and Pyry for their long journey. The zoo will host several parties in their honor next month, including one in which a choral group of Chinese singers living in Finland is scheduled to sing and bid them farewell. (The pandas may be pleased by that: Ms. Valiaho said the animals perked up when they hear Chinese.)
Then, the bears will enter a monthlong quarantine before their flight to China.
And the zoo’s pricey Panda House?
“It’s suitable for bears,” Ms. Valiaho said. “And there are other species of bears in the world.”
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