🐼 Cute, huggy, friendly, panda has been an influential ambassador of China for decades, rapidly gaining its international popularity after the founding of PRC. There’s a term dedicated to the practice of giving pandas to other countries as a way to maintain political relations— « Panda diplomacy ». Actually, this practice existed as far back as the Tang dynasty, when Empress Wu Zetian sent a pair of pandas to Emperor Tenmu of Japan in 685. Due to the deterioration of their natural habitat, in 1982, the government decided to stop giving pandas to other countries, but rent them instead. If pandas are the stars of diplomacy in the 20th century, then at the beginning of the 19th century, it was giraffes who played the leading role. At the time, Europeans had never seen this creature and they were allured by exotic animals from foreign lands. In 1824, the first giraffe Zarafa was offered by Muhammad Ali of Egypt to King Charles X of France. After a long voyage of 5000 km, in 1827 it became the first giraffe stepping on the land of France, attracting an eighth of the population in Paris and creating the « giraffe fashion » nationwide. #panda #pandadiplomacy #ambassador #politicalgifts #chineseculture #internationalrelations #tinyeyescomics https://www.instagram.com/p/Bz24Bv5CRhm/?igshid=132oy8vx69b6b
