The old-growth connector.

Wanglang was set up in 1965, in the first generation of Chinese panda reserves, to protect the core of the Minshan's giant panda A population — the largest remaining wild panda lineage. Its 32,297 hectares of old conifer forest sit at the top of glacial valleys between Jiuzhaigou and Huanglong, and its real job is connection: the reserve is the hinge that keeps eleven protected areas across the northern Minshan joined into one corridor of habitat.

The forest itself is the spectacle. Chinese National Geographic counted its subalpine dark conifer stands among the country's finest, and in 2016 researchers placed a permanent forest-monitoring plot here — the only one of its kind inside panda habitat anywhere. Around the reserve live the Baima Tibetans, a distinct community whose masked dance, listed as national intangible heritage, gives the valley a cultural signature no other panda reserve has.

The corridor keeps growing, too. Next door runs Laohegou, a former logging valley turned community-managed conservation area — the first of its kind in China — where patrol teams drawn from the surrounding townships walk the same ridgelines for panda, takin and red panda. It is the corridor idea working in practice: protection spreading beyond the reserve boundary into the valleys people actually live in.