Tian Tian (female giant panda) Tian Tian (female giant panda) Tian Tian (, meaning "Sweetie") is a female panda born on 24 August 2003 at the Beijing Zoo from mother Niu Niu and father Ying Ying, and currently resident at Edinburgh Zoo, Scotland. She arrived in Edinburgh in December 2011 together with a male panda named Yáng Guāng (, meaning "sunshine"). Currently they are the only two pandas in the United Kingdom. They are on a 10-year loan from the Bifengxia Breeding Centre in China at a cost of £640,000 per year. When in China Tian Tian, successfully gave birth to twins on 7 August
Tian 大 as "a large or great man". The Zhou subsequently added a head on him to denote "tian" 天 meaning "king, kings" (cf. "wang" "king; ruler", which had oracle graphs picturing a line under a "great person" and bronze graphs that added the top line). From "kings", "tian" was semantically extended to mean "dead kings; ancestral kings", who controlled "fate; providence", and ultimately a single omnipotent deity "Tian" "Heaven". In addition, "tian" named both "the heavens" (where ancestral kings and gods supposedly lived) and the visible "sky". Another possibility is that "Tian" may be related to "Tengri" and possibly was