Smithsonian, Pandering to Fans, Says it Won’t Stuff Hsing-Hsing

Panda lovers, relax. The National Zoo’s last giant panda, Hsing-Hsing, who died in November, will not be stuffed for display.

“There are too many people who care,” Smithsonian Institution chief Lawrence M. Small said in an interview Monday. “They felt the panda was part of their lives. To say you were going to display it was just not a smart thing to do.” The panda’s body was donated to science, Small said.

China in the future likely will rent pandas to foreign countries, he said, not loan them or give them away like Hsing-Hsing, a gift to America after President Nixon’s visit to China in 1972.

Small predicted he would have no trouble raising an estimated $8 million needed to rent a new pair of pandas from China for 10 years. Any offspring, he said, could be kept though they would still belong to the Chinese government. But he said he believed it would take protracted negotiations to work out the details.

“We have a team over there now,” he said.