Pandas live only in the mountainy forests of the Sichuan area. They are mostly active around dawn and dusk, and have never been huge in number.
They do not live in the traditional Chinese heartland, Sichuan didn’t join China until about 200BC, and remained a hinterland up into the modern day.
Lack of accessibility, being on the periphery of China, and difficulty to encounter will all have contributed.
“Mo” (貘) is the modern Chinese word for tapir, and the South East Asian Tapir which traditionally had range into Southern China is also a black and white, small number, hard to encounter forest animal that lives on the periphery of China.
yogurt@lemmy.world 3 weeks ago
China had two big black and white animals: pandas and tapirs, and the people writing the books weren’t out in the jungle, they were buying dead skins from dealers who hadn’t seen it alive either. Mo started out as a more accurate panda sighting and then gradually turned into a chimera with a tapir nose and panda claws and magical hydrophobic fur like a tapir and eats metal like an exaggerated panda. And then it got even more tapir-like when Europeans found tapirs first and declared them the basis of the Mo.