After the devastating earth quake on May 12th 2008. Ms. Cheng Qing who adopted Qing Qing soon after set up the "Qing Qing Foundation" which provides 10,000 RMB worth of awards each year to keepers for their work and dedication to pandas.

This is the first year of the awards and I'm very pleased to see that one of the keepers I was working with, Mr Wang (On the far left in the picture above) was one of the winners. He was great to be with and truly loved the pandas he worked with. Though his English wasn't the best and My Chinese was even poorer we had some great talks about the pandas and his work.

Ms Cheng set up the awards after hearing about how the keepers risked their own lives to safe those of their beloved pandas.

Mr Li, (The keeper I worked directly with) has been promoted to a research position which he enjoys but misses working directly with the pandas everyday. I still keep in touch with him.