Sichuan

China's Fourth National Giant Panda Survey counted 1,864 wild giant pandas, and 1,387 of them live in the bamboo forests of Sichuan. That recovery in numbers and in habitat was enough for the IUCN to move the species from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2016.

The core of the range became a World Heritage Site in 2006. The Sichuan Giant Panda Sanctuaries cover 924,500 hectares across seven nature reserves and nine scenic parks in the Qionglai and Jiajin mountains, holding between five and six thousand plant species alongside the pandas. In 2021 these and dozens of other reserves were folded into the Giant Panda National Park, whose Sichuan section alone runs to 19,300 square kilometres.

The threat now is fragmentation rather than poaching. The survey found the wild population split into 33 separate groups, and 25 of them are too small to sustain themselves without the corridors the national park is meant to provide.

Few places show continental collision as plainly as western Sichuan. India pushing north raised the Tibetan Plateau, and where that uplift meets the rigid block beneath the Yangtze the crust folds into the parallel ranges of the Hengduan Mountains. The Longmenshan fault marks the join, and on 12 May 2008 it ruptured in a magnitude 8.0 earthquake that killed 69,227 people and left almost 18,000 missing.

The Daxue range rises to Gongga Shan, remeasured by China in 2023 at 7,509 metres. Its eastern face drops more than six thousand metres to the Dadu River, and the Hailuogou glacier runs down off it into standing forest at around 2,850 metres, below an icefall a kilometre high.

That vertical span puts subtropical forest, conifers, alpine meadow and permanent ice in a single valley, which is why these mountains hold what they do. The geology is still working: a magnitude 6.8 earthquake struck beside Hailuogou in 2022.

Sichuan has the second largest Tibetan population of any Chinese province, almost all of it in two autonomous prefectures in the west. Garze covers 153,000 square kilometres of historic Kham, a region of horsemen, grassland monasteries at Tagong and Litang, and the sacred peaks of Yading. Ngawa, in what was Amdo, is also the only homeland of the Qiang, whose stone watchtower villages stand in the Min valley that the 2008 earthquake destroyed.

Unlike the Tibet Autonomous Region, neither prefecture requires a travel permit, and Danba, Tagong, Litang and Yading are visited openly. They remain sensitive places. Some areas are closed to foreign visitors and closures are not announced in advance, so itineraries here are confirmed close to departure rather than a year out.

Travelling well here means taking local guidance seriously, asking before photographing people, and leaving politics out of conversations in monasteries.