Vienna - Will it be 'Beautiful Music', 'Bamboo Boy' or
rather 'Lucky Dragon'?
Vienna's Schoenbrunn Zoo has launched an internet vote to name the
panda cub born to pandas Yang Yang and Long Hui in late August.
As the latest addition to Vienna's zoo is technically a Chinese
citizen - its parents are in Austria on loan from China for another
six years - its name is to be Chinese as well.
China's authorities offered a shortlist of four names for the
first panda cub in Europe to be born without the aid of artificial
insemination, the zoo said on its website.
Internet users can klick for 'Hua Shan' - naming the cub, believed
to be a male in honour of one of five Chinese holy mountains. 'Mei
Yue' or 'Beautiful Music', a nod to Austria, are other options.
More complicated for non-Asians is the added twist 'Zhu Wa', the
'Bamboo Boy'. In Chinese, the words for 'bamboo' and 'pig' are
pronounced similarly, the zoo said. This is the Year of the Pig
according to the Chinese calendar.
'Fu Long', or 'Lucky and Happy Dragon' is a self-explanatory
symbol of luck and good prospect, even for Europeans with little
insight into Chinese culture.
The new furry superstar remains unfazed by all the attention. The
cub - the zoo is still not sure about its gender - continues to grow
and is slowly starting to crawl and move about the enclosure where it
and its mother Yang Yang have been since the birth.
But whether the cub is named after a mountain or a dragon won't
matter to most of the zoo's visitors who have been admiring the cute
little furball.
For them, the baby panda is simply 'Kruemel', German for 'little
crumb', and will likely remain a Kruemel even if he adds another 100
kilos over the next years.
© 2007 dpa - Deutsche Presse-Agentur 
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