Jiuzhaigou county · One day, booked on its own
One day in the hills of Jiuzhaigou county: a volunteer shift at a reserve that takes nobody else that day, then an afternoon in a Baima Tibetan village for a masked dance that is running out of dancers.
Volunteering with pandas used to be the thing to do in Chengdu. Dujiangyan, or Wolong.
Then photographs of visitors feeding pandas went round online, and the criticism landed on the bases rather than the visitors. Feeding stopped. Close contact stopped.
The programme shrank. The price did not. So we went north.
08:30Retired home
Wujiao reserve · Jiawuhai · pandas home from abroad
The reserve sits inside Wujiao nature reserve in Jiuzhaigou county, ringed by mountains, with its own lake — Jiawuhai — and old forest around it. Several giant pandas live here in enclosures built to imitate the habitat, and the place runs as much on conservation and science education as on visitors. On the busiest day of the last national holiday, Jiuzhaigou's main scenic area took over 41,000 people. This valley took a fraction of that.
09:00A real volunteer day
Bamboo · food prep · cleaning · care
Gear on, keepers' briefing, and into it: cutting and carrying bamboo, preparing food, cleaning enclosures, then the care itself. Mornings, because that is the only part of the day a panda is reliably awake. Every step is on the keepers' terms, with a keeper beside you throughout.
09:30Volunteer days are closed days
No day-trippers · no fence line to fight for
On a volunteer day the reserve takes no one else. There is no crowd at the rail, no queue for a viewing window, no one asking you to move along. Four pandas, their keepers, and you — which is a large part of why the drive north is worth doing at all.
11:00How near, exactly
And that is all we will put in writing
The closeness the big bases had to rein in still exists here, under the keepers' supervision. Exactly what that means on the day is something your guide tells you one-to-one when you book — keeping it off a public page is part of how we protect the reserve, and part of the agreement that lets this run at all.
14:00Not the Tibet you pictured
Low valley · no acclimatising · their own dress and customs
The Baima are a Tibetan group who barely register in the public imagination — their dress, their food and their customs all sit apart from what people picture. The practical difference for you is altitude: they live low, in a valley, so getting there costs you nothing physically. You arrive, and there is a welcome the village lays on itself.
What the masks actually are
The dance is called zhou in Baima — it means auspicious mask dance, and in Chinese it is usually called the dance of twelve animals. It went onto China's very first national heritage list in 2006, filed by Jiuzhaigou county.
The lead dancer wears a lion, king of the beasts. Behind him the masks come in fixed order: ox, tiger, dragon, leopard, snake, rooster, then two small demons and two large ones. Seven, nine or eleven dancers, depending on the occasion.
It comes out of a belief that everything in the world is alive and has a spirit — a fusion of Di-Qiang and Tibetan culture, and one of the last living traces of the ancient hundred beasts dancing. There are three sets: one for the gods and the mountain, one for the village square, and one for going door to door wishing people well.
Fewer people can perform it every year. Nobody in the village dresses that up: what you are watching has a finite number of performances left in it.
17:00The part that matters most
Not a banquet — what the family eats
You eat in a village home, at the family's own table, from what they cook for themselves. Your guide sits in and keeps the conversation moving both ways — what is on the plate, how the household runs, what is different about how each of you lives. It is the least performed hour of the day, and generally the one people talk about afterwards.
“In the end guests ask one thing of pandas: to be as near them as they can get. When the big programmes had to rein that in, we drove north and found the one valley where a reserve — and a village — would sign with us alone. The morning is for the pandas. The afternoon is for the people who got there first.”Charles Yang · LyrikTrip travel designer, Chengdu
One full day on its own. Tell us a date and we'll confirm the reserve's volunteer schedule.
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