Panda and elephant – contesting animal icons in Thai tourism

In May 2009, during a period of rising political polarization in Thailand, a cub was unexpectedly born in Chiang Mai’s Zoo to a pair of Chinese pandas. The authorities used the occasion to boost the crisis-ridden tourism to the northern Thai city, instigating an unprecedented national craze around the tiny cub, and promoting a massive pilgrimage of domestic visitors to the zoo. In a conspicuous act of protest against the prioritization of the foreign pandas, some elephant keepers in the Ayutthya kraal, painted their animals in panda colors, leading to an implicit contest between the two animal icons. In this case study, the wider theoretical and comparative implications of that contest are analyzed. Whereas previous studies of tourists engagement with captive wild animals paid scant attention to its wider social context, the article examines the cultural and economic background of the contest, and the manner in which it became implicated in the process of political polarization between the societal center and the periphery.