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Lisa Lim

It’s pandamonium in Hong Kong.
The city is now home to the largest number of giant pandas outside mainland China, with a pair recently gifted by Beijing, the third since Hong Kong’s 1997 return to Chinese sovereignty, taking the total to six of the creatures, all at Ocean Park.
Thematic festivities include panda sculptures blending intangible cultural heritage with contemporary design at Cheung Sha Wan Promenade, and 2,500 sculptures of pandas at various landmarks.
These pop-ups all feature giant pandas, and 90 per cent of hits from an online search for “panda” refer to the bear-like, characteristically black-and-white giant panda. Yet the term panda originally referred to the red or lesser panda, a tree-dwelling, raccoon-like mammal in northeast Asia with reddish-brown fur, white face markings, and a long ringed tail.


The technical zoological name was introduced in French in Georges Léopold Cuvier’s 1825 Natural History of Mammals, although the first description of the lesser panda in the West was first read by Thomas Hardwicke to the Linnaean Society in 1821.
The name most probably came from the second element of the hybrid Nepali and Tibetan term Nigálya-pónya, noted as a local name in Nepal and Sikkim in B.H. Hodgson’s 1847 paper in the Journal of the Asiatic Society Bengal.

The first element of the term derived from the Nepali nigālyā “cane-eating” – akin to Nepali niṅāle, relating to a bamboo species. The second element is understood to be a regional Tibetan term representing an animal name, pho-ña, meaning “messenger, envoy”, though alternate explanations point to Nepali pauṃjā “paw”, influenced by panjā “claws”.
Pōnya is also sometimes cited on its own as meaning “eater of bamboo”.
Meanwhile, the first scientific description of the giant panda presented to Europeans came half a century later, in 1869, from French missionary Armand David.

Originally regarded by zoologists as a bear, the giant panda’s closer correspondence with the red panda was established in 1901, based on tooth structure and skull shape, and – then considered the “new panda” – it was thus categorised in the same family as the red panda – the “true panda”.
Molecular studies in the 1980s, however, resulted in the giant panda being once again placed in the bear family Ursidae, and its typology continues to be debated.
The red panda was once considered “the most beautiful of all known quadrupeds”, as observed by English naturalist and renowned illustrator William Swainson in 1835.

However, the giant panda has in contemporary popular culture garnered greater appeal, perhaps because of its cuddly aspect, and its endangered status and adoption as World Wildlife Fund symbol – a typical instance of charismatic megafauna; this was buoyed by movies like Kung Fu Panda. The name panda thus has become more associated with the giant panda, with the smaller animal assuming the retronym lesser panda or red panda.
Similarly in modern Chinese, 熊貓 hùhng māau in Cantonese, xióngmāo in Mandarin, “bear cat” (貓熊 “cat bear” before writing system reform), originally referred to red pandas.
The addition of prefixes 小 Cantonese síu / Mandarin xiăo “small” or 大 Cantonese daaih / Mandarin dà “big”, distinguishes between the red and giant panda respectively; nowadays 熊貓 without prefix tends to mean the giant panda.

Chinese texts and Classical Chinese poetry since the 3rd century BC have featured the creature 貘 mò, whose characters combine phonetic component 莫 “no, nothing, not” with semantic indicator豸 “predatory beast” (or 犭“dog”).
This has referred to the giant panda as well as to a mythical elephant-rhinoceros-cow-tiger chimera – but a 19th-century misidentification led to mò being used for the black-and-white Malayan tapir.
In the main panda habitat of Sichuan, regional names include 花熊 “flower(y) bear” and 白熊 “white bear”. Whiteness is also seen in a variant of 貘 mò as 貃 bo with 白 “white” phonetic component. Notably, Chinese auspicious creatures are frequently white.
Yet rather than be 熊貓 hùhng māau – Cantonese slang for a sleep-deprived person, because of 熊貓眼 “panda eyes” – over etymological and taxonomical complexities, let’s celebrate this auspicious panda diplomacy.


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An An, one of  two giant pandas gifted to Hong Kong in 2024. Photo: Robert Ng

A red panda at a wildlife park in the UK. The small, tree-dwelling creature was the first to be given the name panda by Western science, but say “panda” today and it is short for giant panda. Photo: PA Images via Getty Images

One of the panda sculptures exhibited at Cheung Sha Wan Promenade to celebrate the arrival of the third giant panda pair in Hong Kong. Photo: Eugene Lee

People visit giant panda An An, one of the new arrivals at Ocean Park in Hong Kong, in December 2024. Photo: Edmond So

Red panda Li Zi at Ocean Park. Also called the lesser panda, they were described to Western scientists decades before the giant panda was. Photo: K.Y. Cheng

Giant panda Le Le at Ocean Park. Zoologists first thought the giant panda was a bear, before placing it in the same family as the red panda. Recently it has been reclassified a bear. Photo: May Tse

The red panda was considered “the most beautiful of all known quadrupeds”. But it was long ago eclipsed by the giant panda, with its cuddly image. Photo: PA Images via Getty Images

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Arts & Culture

‘Panda’, probably of Tibetan origin, was first applied to the red panda. Say it now and it’s taken to mean the black-and-white giant panda


‘Panda’, probably of Tibetan origin, was first applied to the red panda. Say it now and it’s taken to mean the black-and-white giant panda.


Animals

Hong Kong’s pandas

Pandas

Expresses the views, ideas and conclusions of the author. (Eg. Enough of Crazy Rich Asians, think of crazy poor Hongkongers.)


Column

Language Matters

Language Matters | How did giant panda eclipse ‘true panda’, the red one? Don’t get panda-eyed wondering why

‘Panda’, probably of Tibetan origin, was first applied to the red panda. Say it now and it’s taken to mean the black-and-white giant panda