When Pat and I walked into our hotel room in Chengdu, the first thing we noticed was the stuffed panda doll sitting on your bed.

Nothing could be more fitting in this ultramodern central China megalopolis that’s home to a leading panda breeding and research center and omnipresent images of the cuddly, black-and-white bears.

I once saw a panda in Washington’s National Zoo, but nothing can compare with the immersive experience you get at Chengdu’s Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding. (When I refer to pandas, I mean giant pandas, not the much smaller red pandas that look more like raccoons. The breeding center also has red pandas, which have been known to bite overly friendly tourists.)

The center, which was founded in 1987, houses more than 100 giant pandas in an immaculately landscaped 250-acre park. Though the pandas mostly stay inside during the hottest summer months, the rest of the year they live outdoors in spacious playpens where they spent most of their time chewing on bamboo shoots, climbing trees, sleeping and excreting waste.

We witnessed all of these activities during our two-hour guided tour.  Most of the older pandas were snoozing, on the ground or perched in trees, while the cubs frolicked like puppies – rolling around and chasing each other up trees, with one even doing a backward somersault off a log platform.

Pandas also shit a lot. Their digestive systems, a carryover from their days as carnivores, aren’t equipped to handle all the bamboo they eat. So the plants pass right through them, leading to frequent evacuations. “I wouldn’t want to clean their cages,’’ our guide said.

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Here’s some other fast facts I picked up from our guide, personal observation and the center’s museum:

  • Half of all panda births in captivity produce twins.
  • Some male bears are shown “panda porn’’ – films showing pandas coupling — to stimulate them before collecting semen for artificial insemination.
  • Although recent genetic testing proves that giant pandas are bears, some still claim they’re members of the raccoon family.
  • Kobe Bryant and Jackie Chan have donated to the center as part of its “adopt a panda’’ program.
  • It’s hard to tell the gender of a young panda.
  • Two of Teddy Roosevelt’s sons killed a panda in China in 1928.
  • American fashion designer and socialite Ruth Harkness went to China in 1936 and found a baby panda that she brought back to the U.S. To get the cub out of China, she listed it as a dog on her customs form. The panda ended up at a Chicago-area zoo, where it died a year later.
  • When panda keepers at the center call the bears by name, they quickly respond and follow the keeper.
  • Unlike other bears, pandas don’t hibernate in the winter.
  • They have a “pseudo thumb’’ that allows them to hold food.
  • When a mother has twins in the wild, she will abandon one so the other can survive.
  • There are an estimated 1,600 pandas left in the wild, most of them in central China.
  • Keepers dangle honey from a stick to get pandas to stand on their hind legs, which strengthens them and makes them better walkers.

If that’s not enough panda trivia for you, visit the center or watch “King Fu Panda’’ with your kids for the 20th time.

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Later in the day we visited the Du Fu Thatched Cottage Museum, which honors the 8th-century poet sometimes described as China’s Shakespeare, and People’s Park, a crowded gathering place filled with elderly singers, Chinese checkers players and a “marriage market’’ where singles post personal ads.

Pat, an aficionado of Japanese gardening, particularly enjoyed the park’s bonsai collection. We were both enthralled by a young man who was drawing traditional Chinese characters on the ground with water discharged from a pointed sponge attached to a stick.

Another strange sight: streetside ear cleaners. As we walked through a posh pedestrian mall known as the Wide and Narrow Alleys, we saw a half-dozen men sitting in chairs getting their ears cleaned with tweezers and metal picks that looked like dental tools.

It looked painful, though one customer I asked said it wasn’t. Still, I think I’d rather be clogged with wax than have someone stick a metal pick in my ear.

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One place we didn’t have time to visit was Chengdu’s New Century Global Center, which has more floor space than any building in the world. The 18 million-square foot complex includes stores, hotels, movie theaters, offices, a water park, a skating rink, a pirate ship and an artificial beach with a 500-foot long LED screen that projects sunrises and sunsets.

The center is almost three times larger than the Pentagon and has enough room to house 20 Sidney Opera Houses. It’s fourth-fifths the size of Monaco. Whoever said size doesn’t matter obviously never went to China.