Taipei Zoo's newest panda cub debuts to thousands of adoring fans

Nearly 10,000 people visited Taiwan's first native-born giant panda as she made her highly anticipated public debut yesterday.

The island has been gripped by panda fever since Yuan Zai's birth in July last year. She even beat the island's president, Ma Ying-jeou, in an online vote on the biggest news personalities of 2013.

Fans started lining up outside Taipei Zoo at 5.30am and within minutes of its opening at 9am, 1,200 people had queued outside the panda enclosure, zoo authorities said. Yuan Zai charmed the morning crowds of mostly parents and young children for 40 minutes, climbing a wooden structure then crawling over to her mother, Yuan Yuan, to be breastfed before falling asleep.

"Even though today is a Monday, the zoo is a sea of people," one Weibo user wrote at the attraction. "Yuan Zai's popularity in Taipei is so high that all of Taipei Zoo and even Taipei's streets, newspapers and websites are under her shadow."

A zoo spokeswoman said 9,563 people visited the park yesterday, compared with 2,000 to 3,000 on a normal weekday.

Sixteen companies have received authorisation to sell more than 30 items of Yuan Zai merchandise, including bank cards, laptops and phone cases. The city's department of economic development estimated the products could rake in NT$500 million (HK$128.8 million) within six months.