Armed guards have been deployed near the epicentre of China’s deadly earthquake to protect a national treasure. In fact, 14 national treasures.

They are the youngest of China’s panda cubs, the product of one of the world's most ambitious and successful breeding programmes, and their keepers are determined to save the endangered animal that is the emblem of the World Wide Fund for Nature.

These small bundles of black and white fur live at the Wolong Panda Reserve in a valley now devastated by Monday’s tremor. When the earth shook, sending rocks and huge boulders flying through the air above their home, British tourist Judy Ling Wong was having her photo taken cuddling one of the babies.

“They were like babies. I was holding the cub and it stretched out its paw and stroked my face,” she said, running her hand over her cheek to demonstrate. Seconds later the earth erupted around her. As she ran from the nursery, keepers grabbed the cub back.

In their playground and pens, the adult pandas were afraid. Ms Wong saw the animals pacing in panic up and down as the ground shook and trees tumbled down hillsides.

When the earth settled, the visitors and panda keepers realised that the bridge that was their only escape had crumbled into the river that rushed along the bottom of the valley. The keepers quickly improvised a new crossing, lashing together bamboo ladders.

Once Ms Wong and her fellow British tourists had been helped across the bridge, the keepers returned to collect their precious charges.

“They carried the babies one by one over the bridge. You can imagine how difficult and dangerous it was to carry these squirming cubs with the river underneath. But they did it. And as soon as they were across, they just ran with each one to reach shelter.”

The nursery was no longer safe because of cracks in the building, so they placed the cubs in the wooden ticket booth that was undamaged. The entire booth, cubs inside, was then moved up the valley to a wider patch of flat ground where they would be in less danger from aftershock.

The adults, numbering more than 100, remained in their pens where they can live and play outside. Ms Wong, director of the Black Environment Network, an environmental and sustainable development group, said: “They are much easier to feed because they are able to eat bamboo so the keepers can throw in more leaves each day for them. But the babies are only about nine-months-old and are not yet weaned. They are all hand-fed.”

Two armed guards were deployed outside the ticket booth to protect these tiny national symbols in the isolated valley cut off from the outside world by landslides along approach roads.

This morning, panda experts were at last able to reach the reserve for the first time as one mountain road, over passes as high as 4,000 metres, was reopened. Bamboo, cornbread, apples and antibiotics were brought in for the pandas.

Zhang Zhihe, director of the Chengdu Panda Breeding and Research Centre, said: “The pandas are safe. Their keepers haven’t left them for one second since the earthquake.”

Times Recommends

• 'New York has lost its edge'
• Copenhagen will fail – and quite right too
• More than 17,000 new underwater species found