The National Zoo's three celebrity giant pandas will be heading home a little earlier than expected. Zoo officials told The Associated Press on Thursday that adult bears Mei Xiang and Tian Tian and their cub Xiao Qi Ji will be returning to China sometime in mid-November.
Giant panda Xiao Qi Ji plays at his enclosure at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington, Thursday, Sept. 28, 2023. WASHINGTON — The National Zoo’s three celebrity giant pandas will be heading home a little earlier than expected. Zoo officials told The Associated Press on Thursday that adult bears Mei Xiang and Tian Tian and their cub Xiao Qi Ji will be returning to China sometime in mid-November.
Panda-philes around the country had circled the December date as the last chance to view the iconic bears. But the zoo, for undisclosed reasons, said the departure would happen about three weeks earlier. The bears have been a wildly popular attraction and an unofficial symbol of the nation’s capital for decades. Every birthday and anniversary was an occasion for public celebration and the long-shot birth of Xiao Qi Ji in the midst of the pandemic in August 2020 drove millions of viewers to the zoo’s panda-cam.
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