‘Luxury pig-view hotel room’: China suite offers US$1,230 a night stay with ‘panda pigs’, year’s supply of famous ham and hog to take home
- Theme park gives guests chance to experience some of China’s rarest and most highly-valued pigs at close quarters
- Viral video of hotel room with view of piggery shows it has a sealed window so visitors can see the famous porkers, but not smell them
Tourists in China are paying 8,888 yuan (US$1,230) for a hotel room with a view into the lives of some of the country’s rarest and most highly-valued pigs, traditional source of China’s world famous Jinhua ham.
The first-floor room in a castle-shaped building at the theme park in Zhejiang province in eastern China includes a sealed window looking on to the ground floor piggery so that guests can look at – but not smell – the animals below.
A video clip of the room and its unique outlook has been viewed 6 million times on Douyin, China’s version of TikTok, since it was posted on June 25 by Zhejiang media outlet, Tianmu News.
Dubbed Jinhua’s Disneyland, the theme park opened in 2021 to promote the breed, nicknamed the “panda pig” because of its unique black head and rear, with a white band around its middle.
The breed – originally named “two-end black pig” – has been prized in China for at least 1,200 years.
It is best known as the traditional source of Jinhua dry-cured ham, which ranks alongside Italy’s Prosciutto di Parma and Jamón Ibérico from Spain.
Some believe that it was Marco Polo who brought the secret of dry-cured ham from Jinhua to Europe in the 13th century, leading to the development of the process outside China.
The distinctive pig shares more than looks with the giant panda, it is similarly rare.
A 2016 report by Qianjiang Evening News put the annual available number of the breed in Jinhua at 75,000 to 80,000, just 3 to 4 per cent of the city’s total pigs.
Despite its reputation for providing the best Jinhua ham, thanks to its firm flesh, thin skin and bones, local breeders have turned away from the panda pig in favour of breeds from overseas that only need half the time to grow nearly twice the size.
The breed has become so rare that a Japanese farm, which also keeps panda pigs, has named it the “phantasmic pig”.
It was in order to promote and preserve its famous pig that the local government developed a theme park celebrating the rare breed.
The facility includes a museum dedicated to the panda pig, as well as a cafe and meeting room.
Guests who book the luxury pig-watching room can also take a panda pig home or enjoy a year’s worth of pork priced at 6,000 yuan (US$830), according to a report in the Economic Daily.
In 2016, the Jinhua government spent five million yuan on research into the development and uses for the two-end black pig breed.
One project looked into maximising the breed’s value by developing a set of standards to divide the meat into primal and sub-primal cuts.
