PONDERING ITS POPULARITY: Pandas are as much a symbol of China as the Great Wall and a must-see on every visitor's list  (ROSEANNE GERIN)

One thing that I have come to know after living in China for more than a year is that there is a saying or legend for just about everything. And, of course, there is one for the panda bear, the country's beloved national treasure.

On a September trip to Sichuan Province to visit the Bifengxia giant panda base, our local guide told us how the animals got their black markings. A Chinese legend has it that a Tibetan girl saw a leopard fighting with a gentle white bear one day. But when she tried to help the bear, the leopard killed her. With its own life spared, the grateful bear called upon its colleagues to hold a funeral for the girl. All the bears wore black armbands with which they used to wipe their copious tears as they mourned, leaving black spots around their eyes. They then put their wet armbands to their ears to muffle the overpowering sound of their collective weeping and blacked them as well. The guide didn't provide details about how the pandas' extremities became black, but one only has to imagine that the wet armbands saturated the fur on the bears' arms, and they tried to rub them clean by wiping them on their legs, which turned black as well.

It is no wonder then that images of pandas are everywhere in China-stuffed ones of all sizes, panda-shaped book bags and purses, T-shirts and coffee mugs that feature pandas, and even glass snuff bottles with pandas painted inside them. One of the five Beijing Olympic mascots was a panda named Jingjing. This year, many children both inside and outside China had their first exposure to a panda when they saw the American animated comedy film Kungfu Panda, whose protagonist, a chubby panda named Po, aspires to become a martial arts master.

Many foreigners have fond recollections of pandas from their childhood even if they have never seen a live one. When I was about five years old, one of my grandmothers gave me a small, stuffed, panda-like teddy bear that I named Boo-Boo. I faithfully tucked him under my arm every night when I went to sleep. Around the same time I received Boo-Boo, my parents bought me a larger and stiffer panda. Although he wasn't the huggable type, he sat prominently on the floor of my bedroom with Tigger the Tiger and other various creatures.

When I was a little older, the highlight of a summer daytrip to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. was catching a glimpse of Ling-Ling or Hsing-Hsing, the two pandas that China gave to the United States as gifts in 1972.

Having not seen any live pandas since that time, I was quite eager to go to Sichuan, the official home of the pandas, to see live bears in their natural habitat. Sichuan has 16 panda sanctuaries divided up as nature reserves and scenic parks. About 80 percent of the pandas that live in the wild in China are in the forests and mountains of northwest Sichuan, a lush area replete with bamboo, the panda's dietary staple.

The Bifengxia giant panda base and research center lies about 150 km from Chengdu, the provincial capital. All the pandas from the country's famous Wolong Nature Reserve, most of which was destroyed by the devastating May 12 earthquake, have been transferred here. Fewer than a dozen cubs remain in what's left of Wolong.