On our Treasures of China tour you can see these gentle giants at the Panda Research Centre in Chengdu, which has been working since 1990 to study the giant panda and increase the number of breeding pairs. The 92-acre centre is home to many pandas, who roam large, leafy enclosures. Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that visitors to China will see giant pandas in the wild: there are roughly 1,800 pandas living outside of captivity in China, with most of these inhabiting nature reserves. Though numbers have increased over the last decade, they are still a vulnerable species.