Life on plateau Yandao, 35, had never been to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau before he joined an observation team on China’s second scientific expedition to the plateau in June. Yandao, a member of the Blang ethnic group, comes from a village in Xishuangbanna, in Yunnan Province. After graduating with a degree in zoology from Southwest Forestry University in 2013, he began working as an ornithologist* at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Kunming Institute of Zoology. China’s first large-scale scientific expedition to the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau was conducted in the 1970s. The second expedition will last five to 10 years, covering more than 50 disciplines including geology, prehistoric life, geophysics, climate, zoology and botany. Aged panda gives 6th birth An 18-year-old captive-bred* panda, considered old among pandas eligible for pregnancy, has given birth for the sixth time in Southwest China. Qizhen’s water broke at around 6 a.m. on Saturday. The cub, the 10th by the mother, weighed 168 grams at birth. Both are very healthy, said Wu Kongju, a panda expert with the Chengdu Giant Panda Breeding Center in Sichuan Province. She gave birth to nine cubs in five births in 2006, 2008, 2010, 2011 and 2014. Guangdong artwork A Chinese painting depicting Xi Zhongxun’s bold experiment in governance at a base of the revolution in the early 1930s has attracted attention at the National Art Museum of China in Beijing, where 554 works of art created by the top Guangdong artists from the past 100 years are on display from July 8 to 23. In the painting, titled “Xi Zhongxun in Nanliang,” Xi, then chairman of the first regional Soviet-style government in Northwest China, is surrounded by joyful soldiers and villagers celebrating the success of his pioneering policies. Desert freeway sections Three new sections of freeway, mostly in desert areas, were put into use on Saturday, marking the completion of an expressway between Beijing and Northwest China’s Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region. The three sections in Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, Gansu Province and Xinjiang have a combined length of more than 1,200 km. (SD-Agencies) | 