It's official. Hungry foreign hordes craving a fix of diced chicken fried with chili and peanuts during the Beijing Olympics will be able to shout "kung pao chicken!" and have some hope of getting just that.

As it readies for an influx of visitors for the August Games, the Chinese capital has offered restaurants an official English translation of local dishes whose exotic names and alarming translations can leave foreign visitors frustrated and famished.

If officials have their way, local newspapers reported on Wednesday, English-speaking visitors will be able to order "beef and ox tripe in chili sauce," an appetizer, rather than "husband and wife's lung slice."

Other favorites have also received a linguistic makeover.

"Bean curd made by a pock-marked woman," as the Beijing Youth Daily rendered the spicy Sichuanese dish, is now "Mapo tofu." And "chicken without sexual life" becomes mere "steamed pullet."

According to one widely repeated story, the Chinese name of "kung pao chicken" comes from the name of an imperial official who was fed the dish during an inspection tour.

With the Beijing Olympics 51 days away, a notice on the city tourism bureau website ( http://www.bjta.gov.cn ) told restaurants to come and pick up a book with the suggested translations.

In China, where meetings are almost as popular as banquets, agreeing on the English-language menu has taken many rounds of discussions over previous drafts since last year.

Just as predictably in this country where nationalism and the Internet make a potent brew, controversy has already broken out over the blander new translations.

""I don't like this new naming method, it's abandoning Chinese tradition," one Internet comment declared. "There are many stories in the names of these dishes."

Nearly a month after China's devastating earthquake, the Wolong Nature Reserve held a funeral Tuesday for a panda that was crushed in the temblor.

The world famous panda center was badly damaged by the May 12 quake but officials initially thought all 64 pandas had survived. They later discovered that two were missing.

Nine-year-old Mao Mao, the mother of five at the breeding center, was found Monday, her body crushed by a wall of her enclosure when the river behind it swelled with landslide debris.

On Tuesday, panda keepers and other workers placed her remains in a small wooden crate and wheeled her quietly to a patch of ground outside the breeding center where a freshly dug hole waited.

The center's director, Zhang Hemin, stood with his cap in hand and then shoveled in a few spades of dirt. Mao Mao's keeper, He Changgui, stepped forward, crying, and placed two apples and a piece of bread by the covered grave. There were three minutes of silence.

As the others left, the director of the U.S.-based Pandas International, Suzanne Braden put her arm around He.

"You must look after her babies, OK?" she said. "And their babies."

He nodded. "I will go back to see her everyday," he said.

Forty-seven pandas continue to live at Wolong, while one other panda, Xiao Xiao, remains missing.

The endangered panda is revered as a kind of national mascot in China. About 1,590 pandas live in the wild, mostly in Sichuan and the neighboring province of Shaanxi. Another 180 have been bred in captivity.

The nature reserve was heavily damaged by the quake, which was centered just 20 miles away in the heart of Sichuan province's mountainous panda country. Five Wolong staff members were killed in the quake. Most staffers, tourists and pandas were outside at the time.

Nearly 70,000 people were killed, and more than 5 million were left homeless by the 7.9-magnitude quake.

Some of Wolong's pandas have been moved to another breeding center in Sichuan's provincial capital, Chengdu, and eight were flown to Beijing for a previously scheduled six-month stay at the Beijing Zoo for the Olympics.

The center will have to be relocated to a new site because of safety issues, said Huang Yan, deputy director of research, but it will remain within the confines of Wolong Nature Reserve, which is located in a damp, narrow valley several hours' drive from Chengdu.

He, Mao Mao's keeper, returned from the grave with red eyes. He had been the panda's only keeper since she was 3 years old. He would speak to her in the local Sichuan dialect as he worked.

"It's like you could say something and she would understand," he said. "If you were happy, she was happy too."

Panda trying to nap

Wolong Panda Reserve: link

Pandas International: link

First, the water level in a pond inexplicably plunged. Then, thousands of toads appeared on streets in a nearby province. Finally, just hours before China's worst earthquake in three decades, animals at a local zoo began acting strangely.

As bodies are pulled from the wreckage of Monday's quake, Chinese online chat rooms and blogs are buzzing with a question: Why didn't these natural signs alert the government that a disaster was coming?

"If the seismological bureau were professional enough they could have predicted the earthquake ten days earlier, when several thousand cubic meters of water disappeared within an hour in Hubei, but the bureau there dismissed it," one commentator wrote.

In fact, seismologists say, it is nearly impossible to predict when and where an earthquake will strike.

Several countries, including China, have sought to use changes in nature — mostly animal behavior — as an early warning sign. But so far, no reliable way has been found to use animals to predict earthquakes, said Roger Musson, a seismologist with the British Geological Survey.

But that has not stopped a torrent of online discussion. Even the mainstream media has chimed in, with an article in Tuesday's China Daily newspaper questioning why the government did not predict the earthquake.

Online commentators say the first sign came about three weeks ago, when large amounts of water suddenly disappeared from a pond in Enshi city in Hubei province, around 350 miles east of the epicenter, according to media reports.

Then, three days before the earthquake, thousands of toads roamed the streets of Mianzhu, a hard-hit city where at least 2,000 people have been reported killed.

Mianzhu residents feared the toads were a sign of an approaching natural disaster, but a local forestry bureau official said it was normal, the Huaxi Metropolitan newspaper reported May 10, two days before the earthquake.

The day of the earthquake, zebras were banging their heads against a door at the zoo in Wuhan, more than 600 miles east of the epicenter, according to the Wuhan Evening Paper.

Elephants swung their trunks wildly, almost hitting a staff member. The 20 lions and tigers, which normally would be asleep at midday, were walking around. Five minutes before the quake hit, dozens of peacocks started screeching.

There are a few possible reasons for such behavior, said Musson, the seismologist. The most likely is that the movement of underground rocks before an earthquake generates an electrical signal that some animals can perceive. Another theory holds that other animals can sense weak shocks before an earthquake that are imperceptible to humans.

Zhang Xiaodong, a researcher at the China Seismological Bureau, said his agency has used natural activity to predict earthquakes 20 times in the past 20 years, but that still represents a small proportion of China's earthquakes.

"The problem now is this kind of relationship is still quite vague," he said.

In winter 1975, Chinese officials ordered the evacuation of the city of Haicheng in northeastern Liaoning province the day before a 7.3 magnitude earthquake, based on reports of unusual animal behavior and changes in ground water levels. Still, more than 2,000 people died. Strange environmental phenomena including changes in well water levels, were also reported a year later before a 7.6 magnitude earthquake in Tangshan in northeastern China that killed 240,000, Musson said.

A team of Chinese seismologists was sent to the region but didn't find any evidence to suggest an earthquake. As the seismologists were going home, they stopped for the night in Tangshan and were killed in the quake.