I went to see the pandas in Chiang Mai, expecting at most a cursory glimpse. To my delight, they put on a heck of a show.

Nephew David’s arrival in Thailand from Canada finally pried me loose from the apartment long enough to go see the country again, almost exactly 16 years after my last proper tour, which happened to be in the company of his visiting kid brother.

This time, with Dave and his pal Ben, we headed south for some sun and saltwater — and more on that to be posted here — but once we got them back on their homebound plane, there was business to attend to up north, and Ae and I took the opportunity to check out the Chinese sex maniacs incarcerated at the Chiang Mai Zoo.

I kid the Chinese about their promiscuity, of course, but there was a lot of kidding on a global scale back in late 2006 when the zookeepers tried to coerce Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui into having sex. It was purely for research purposes, you understand. Their caretakers just wanted to watch and, naturally, they were hoping for panda cubs.

Chuang Chuang and Lin Hui are the giant pandas that Thailand is renting from China. The fee for one decade, which is being clocked from October 12, 2003, is $250,000, an amount that the furry guests have already earned the zoo many times over in admission charges. They’re still tallying the revenues, however, against the Bt40-million cost of the air-conditioned enclosure they had to build, called the Panda Palace.

It’s a not-altogether-impressive home, but then expats are easily amused. The signs warning human visitors to keep quiet seemed a bit daft given that there was a front-end loader clawing noisily away at the foundation outside. Probably something to do with the plumbing.

The official website, PandaInThailand.net (mostly in Thai), and other sources give credit for the pandas’ presence to Thaksin Shinawatra, the former prime minister who doesn’t live in Thailand anymore because, you know, he’s a crook.

But ThaiWays magazine says it was another former premier, Chavalit Yongchaiyudh, who cooked up the deal with Beijing back in 2001 when he was Thaksin’s deputy PM. Chavalit’s a crook too, so it doesn’t really make any difference. The dual-government spin on the rental is that the pandas are “friendship ambassadors” whose temporary expatriation was a tribute to Her Majesty the Queen on her auspicious sixth-cycle birthday in 2004.

Anyway, the pandas received a welcome in Thailand of the sort usually reserved for this week’s hottest Korean popstar. They were given new names, dreamed up in a national competition, although Taywan and Taywee appear on no signs in the 520-square-metre Panda Palace.

And then, just to keep everything above board in this family-owned country, they were formally married in a ceremony on November 9, 2005. Let the fun begin!

Or not.

First of all, despite being wed, the pandas were a little too young to start getting squishy. Then, when they did hit puberty, they realised there was UK-style video surveillance all over the place. Beijing likes to keep an eye on things too, but these guys are from Sichuan.

And they probably looked at each other and thought, “You? With me? Is this the only choice I have??” In the wild they have a bunch of candidates. Here it was like a bad date.

And in the wild the females climb a tree when they’re in heat so they can watch the males fight over who gets the key to the honeymoon suite. Males like to fight, but of course Chuang Chuang doesn’t have any other blokes around, so he’s going to beat up on Lin Hui.

Off to a bad start, Chuang Chuang sought solace in food — as he still does. While I was in the Panda Palace, for about 40 minutes, if he wasn’t eating, he was gazing around trying to decide what to eat next. Thick stalks of bamboo? Shred some of the skinnier branches? Maybe a salad of some leaves?

Both pandas were taken out of view for a few minutes while their bamboo supplies were restocked, and the zookeepers put piles of it here, there and everywhere, often in appealing upright bouquets. It’s a beautiful banquet, set out several times a day.

So Chuang Chuang got fat. By age seven he was 15 kilograms too hefty to be bouncing on Lin Hui, so a dietician was summoned, and somehow they actually got him doing sit-ups.

No point going on about the tiny window of opportunity that pandas have for mating — it’s one of Animal Planet’s favourite topics. So the fun had to be encouraged. There were hormone shots and artificial insemination. They got hold of Chuang Chuang’s sperm, plus samples from other males around the world whose minders are engaged in an epic struggle to raise the captive breeding population to 300 when only about 15 boy pandas are willing to cooperate.

Finally, enter the Larry Flynt of the animal-husbandry world with his dirty movies. Everyone wants to know, “Who makes sex videos for pandas?”, but I think it’s probably just some of the X-rated stuff from Animal Planet. In fact, they probably don’t need videos, because it’s the sound of sex that turns pandas on. The Chinese figured that out. They are incredibly smart.

The Chinese people, I mean, not the pandas. Chuang Chuang sat on his bench watching movies on a big-screen television of other pandas getting to know each other in a biblical way, and the world’s news media shared a wink and a chuckle, and … nothing happened.

In November 2006 , Associated Press flashed the word of an imminent “baby boom among one of the world’s most beloved but endangered animals”, and local news told us to listen for Lin Hui emitting “a strange goat-like sound” that might indicate she was with child. One of her attendants said it was 70% likely she was indeed pregnant.

Lin Hui was not pregnant, but you know what? Today is her birthday. She’s seven years old. And photogenic as hell. Here’s Ae writing a “many happy returns” message.

Chuang Chuang’s eighth birthday was on August 6. He’s interested in innovative salad recipes, any ideas at all.

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The Chiang Mai Zoo is pretty impressive — maybe because it’s so old. The one in Toronto sucks by comparison, and it leaves London behind as well.

Apparently American expat Harold Mason Young had so much time on his hands beyond his missionary work and “teaching the Thai border police forest survival skills” (or are they the same thing?) that he amassed quite a menagerie on his property and even called it the Chiang Mai Zoo.

Inevitably, as Noah first discovered, the animal population got too big, so in 1955 the Thai Forestry Department gave Young 60 rai (around 30 acres) at the base of Mount Suthep. The Royal Zoological Society of Thailand took over in 1977 and boosted the holdings to 530 rai. Today something like 700,000 visitors a year come to have a gawk at 7,000 animals, including 5,000 birds and 1,200 fish, of which the pla buek — the giant Mekong catfish — is a see-it-while-it-still-exists.

You can scope out tigers, lions, a serow, a mynah that says Sawadee khrap and sighs audibly when you walk away, seals, elephants, alpacas, penguins, meerkats, koalas, hippos, zebras, giraffes, ostriches, tapirs, a rhinoceros, monkeys and apes, tons of snakes and crocodiles and more deer than you can shake a stick at, not that you should.

You can picnic by a waterfall, watch for undetained birds passing through and even camp overnight, but not just anywhere, of course.

My panda video and photos on YouTube …