Just around the corner from the very good and modern Shanghai Ocean Aquarium is a place which is the exact opposite. If you want to see the kind of place people think of when they hear the words “Chinese zoo” but only have time to visit one city, then this is it. I just had a look on Tripadvisor and the phrase “horror show of helpless animals” was used to describe it. I've seen worse zoos before (Jong's Crocodile Farm in Borneo springs to mind first and foremost) but never a worse entirely-indoors collection.
It has a nice entrance archway on the street; the cost of visiting is 60 Yuan which is considerably cheaper than the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium (160 Yuan) but also greatly more than it should be considering the state of the place. You know how some places start off with a good impression and then go downhill? This is not one of those places. The first exhibit is (rather bizarrely) a spotted seal swimming back and forth in a tiny dirty bathtub of a tank. It is actually the very worst of many bad exhibits in the zoo. I probably should have turned around right then but I kept on going. There's a sort of conservatory after the seal which looks like it should be filled with butterflies but isn't. If it was, and if the seal wasn't there beforehand, it would make a very good first exhibit. Instead there are koi and giant gouramis in pools along the walkway, another pool “literally” paved with freshwater stingrays, obscenely tiny pools for a saltwater crocodile and a common snapping turtle, and some weird little wooden “houses” with glass fronts for Madagascar day gecko, Carolina anole, veiled chameleon and Chinese flying frog, and small glass tanks for tiger salamanders and land hermit crabs. Then there is the snake section. Two tall glass cases but with little ground area for Burmese pythons (including an albino), a wall of tiny “pet-shop-style” tanks for about two dozen species and varieties of kingsnakes, milksnakes and cornsnakes, and some similar but larger tanks for pythons and boas (green tree boa, royal python and rainbow boa). All of these are those sort of tanks which have something like vermiculite on the floor and a bowl of water and that's it. Also here are not too small but not large cages for common marmosets which are sort of not horrible but not at all nice either, if that makes sense.
Now you might be forgiven for thinking “seal, lizards, snakes, marmosets ..... Insect Kingdom?” But now you have come to the insect corridor.....er, fronted with two tiny cages for sugar gliders which did not look well! Some of the insects didn't look well either. One of the beetles was plainly dead and posed to look alive, and another (live one) was infested with mites. For an Insect Kingdom there was a distinct lack of invertebrates really. There was a selection of “horned beetles” (stag beetles, hercules beetles, that sort of thing), three species of field crickets behind magnifying glass which was a nice touch, diving beetles, stick insects, a scorpion and a tarantula and that was it. From memory the corridor had maybe 12 or 15 tanks. Here I was thinking that this was the end of the place, ten or fifteen minutes and I'm done, nothing more to see.....but at the end of the corridor was a set of stairs going down, the walls lined with model tree trunks and roots, and a sign saying “More Wonderful Downstairs”. The place just kept on going! I think they used a different dictionary than me to get the word “wonderful” though.
At the bottom of the stairs was an unpleasant smell, an unclean mammal smell. To my left was a maze of tiny chelonian tanks. The sign proclaimed they had 80 species (I counted 43 which is still a hefty number!) but all of them, no matter what their size, were in near-identical tiny wood-and-glass display boxes consisting of a bit of shallow water and a cemented-gravel land area. It was so sad because you only need to watch a turtle or tortoise for ten minutes to see how active they can be and how they love roaming around exploring. Between the tanks there were often mirrored walls which was a little disorientating when sidling between them. I will put the species list at the end. One thing I will say is that the owner is obviously a real reptile enthusiast to have such a collection. Every species had a name label with additional information, and the scientific names were all accurate (although I have updated a couple) except for a couple of typos here and there (e.g. wentatus instead of cruentatus).
Moving on past a goldfish-feeding pool and a display of stuffed former inmates (including five slow lorises and a giant flying squirrel!) I found a long corridor of lizard terrariums. Now these wouldn't necessarily be considered bad – they weren't too small, for example, and might even be typical of what are seen in many zoos – but very few of them were at all suitable for what they were housing and despite the tanks themselves mostly not being small the lizards inside them were often too large for the space (especially the monitors and tegus). Unfortunately, also, many of the lizards were not in the best of health. Some were clearly skinny, some had odd growths on them, a couple appeared to be having trouble shedding skin, and all the tegus were repulsively obese.
At the end of the lizard corridor I was back at the bottom of the stairs where the turtles were. The mammal section was here (so when coming down those stairs, the turtles were to your left and the mammals to your right), and this of course is where the bad smell was coming from. This was a bit harder to stomach than any of the reptile sections simply because they are mammals and it is easier to empathise with mammals than reptiles. Tiny tiny cages for chinchillas and a Siberian chipmunk in a bird cage were the worst. Disgustingly the chipmunk had a sign on its cage where the English part of the translation read “The Siberian chipmunk has become a pet, but needs a lot of room for climbing and should have covered space to retreat.” Next to the chipmunk was a large aviary-style cage for a Pallas' squirrel, and there were two more of these for a slow loris and a European eagle owl of all things. At the end of the mammal section, past the guinea pig and rabbit pens and another little pen for two goats, was a long “aviary” for Leschenault's fruit bats which being a small species probably came off best out of every species in the Kingdom.
Heading away from the mammals back towards the turtles I passed a miniscule tank for a baby saltwater crocodile and a row of frog tanks (which included a Budgett's frog, a species I don't recall having seen before in real life). Trying to find the exit I instead found another room of animals. The place was like a maze!! This room was part museum (lots of pinned insects) but also had a row of tanks for tarantulas, giant centipedes, glow-worms and giant cockroaches, and a really cool set of very nice aquariums for about a dozen different species of freshwater crayfish from around the world. Those crayfish tanks were probably the only nice thing in the building.
Eventually I found the exit (through a gift shop) and ran away.
It has a nice entrance archway on the street; the cost of visiting is 60 Yuan which is considerably cheaper than the Shanghai Ocean Aquarium (160 Yuan) but also greatly more than it should be considering the state of the place. You know how some places start off with a good impression and then go downhill? This is not one of those places. The first exhibit is (rather bizarrely) a spotted seal swimming back and forth in a tiny dirty bathtub of a tank. It is actually the very worst of many bad exhibits in the zoo. I probably should have turned around right then but I kept on going. There's a sort of conservatory after the seal which looks like it should be filled with butterflies but isn't. If it was, and if the seal wasn't there beforehand, it would make a very good first exhibit. Instead there are koi and giant gouramis in pools along the walkway, another pool “literally” paved with freshwater stingrays, obscenely tiny pools for a saltwater crocodile and a common snapping turtle, and some weird little wooden “houses” with glass fronts for Madagascar day gecko, Carolina anole, veiled chameleon and Chinese flying frog, and small glass tanks for tiger salamanders and land hermit crabs. Then there is the snake section. Two tall glass cases but with little ground area for Burmese pythons (including an albino), a wall of tiny “pet-shop-style” tanks for about two dozen species and varieties of kingsnakes, milksnakes and cornsnakes, and some similar but larger tanks for pythons and boas (green tree boa, royal python and rainbow boa). All of these are those sort of tanks which have something like vermiculite on the floor and a bowl of water and that's it. Also here are not too small but not large cages for common marmosets which are sort of not horrible but not at all nice either, if that makes sense.
Now you might be forgiven for thinking “seal, lizards, snakes, marmosets ..... Insect Kingdom?” But now you have come to the insect corridor.....er, fronted with two tiny cages for sugar gliders which did not look well! Some of the insects didn't look well either. One of the beetles was plainly dead and posed to look alive, and another (live one) was infested with mites. For an Insect Kingdom there was a distinct lack of invertebrates really. There was a selection of “horned beetles” (stag beetles, hercules beetles, that sort of thing), three species of field crickets behind magnifying glass which was a nice touch, diving beetles, stick insects, a scorpion and a tarantula and that was it. From memory the corridor had maybe 12 or 15 tanks. Here I was thinking that this was the end of the place, ten or fifteen minutes and I'm done, nothing more to see.....but at the end of the corridor was a set of stairs going down, the walls lined with model tree trunks and roots, and a sign saying “More Wonderful Downstairs”. The place just kept on going! I think they used a different dictionary than me to get the word “wonderful” though.
At the bottom of the stairs was an unpleasant smell, an unclean mammal smell. To my left was a maze of tiny chelonian tanks. The sign proclaimed they had 80 species (I counted 43 which is still a hefty number!) but all of them, no matter what their size, were in near-identical tiny wood-and-glass display boxes consisting of a bit of shallow water and a cemented-gravel land area. It was so sad because you only need to watch a turtle or tortoise for ten minutes to see how active they can be and how they love roaming around exploring. Between the tanks there were often mirrored walls which was a little disorientating when sidling between them. I will put the species list at the end. One thing I will say is that the owner is obviously a real reptile enthusiast to have such a collection. Every species had a name label with additional information, and the scientific names were all accurate (although I have updated a couple) except for a couple of typos here and there (e.g. wentatus instead of cruentatus).
Moving on past a goldfish-feeding pool and a display of stuffed former inmates (including five slow lorises and a giant flying squirrel!) I found a long corridor of lizard terrariums. Now these wouldn't necessarily be considered bad – they weren't too small, for example, and might even be typical of what are seen in many zoos – but very few of them were at all suitable for what they were housing and despite the tanks themselves mostly not being small the lizards inside them were often too large for the space (especially the monitors and tegus). Unfortunately, also, many of the lizards were not in the best of health. Some were clearly skinny, some had odd growths on them, a couple appeared to be having trouble shedding skin, and all the tegus were repulsively obese.
At the end of the lizard corridor I was back at the bottom of the stairs where the turtles were. The mammal section was here (so when coming down those stairs, the turtles were to your left and the mammals to your right), and this of course is where the bad smell was coming from. This was a bit harder to stomach than any of the reptile sections simply because they are mammals and it is easier to empathise with mammals than reptiles. Tiny tiny cages for chinchillas and a Siberian chipmunk in a bird cage were the worst. Disgustingly the chipmunk had a sign on its cage where the English part of the translation read “The Siberian chipmunk has become a pet, but needs a lot of room for climbing and should have covered space to retreat.” Next to the chipmunk was a large aviary-style cage for a Pallas' squirrel, and there were two more of these for a slow loris and a European eagle owl of all things. At the end of the mammal section, past the guinea pig and rabbit pens and another little pen for two goats, was a long “aviary” for Leschenault's fruit bats which being a small species probably came off best out of every species in the Kingdom.
Heading away from the mammals back towards the turtles I passed a miniscule tank for a baby saltwater crocodile and a row of frog tanks (which included a Budgett's frog, a species I don't recall having seen before in real life). Trying to find the exit I instead found another room of animals. The place was like a maze!! This room was part museum (lots of pinned insects) but also had a row of tanks for tarantulas, giant centipedes, glow-worms and giant cockroaches, and a really cool set of very nice aquariums for about a dozen different species of freshwater crayfish from around the world. Those crayfish tanks were probably the only nice thing in the building.
Eventually I found the exit (through a gift shop) and ran away.
