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Himalayan brown bear (Ursus arctos isabellinus), also known as the Himalayan red bear, Isabelline bear or Dzu-Teh
Bed bugs and unruly guests are just a couple of things you don’t want to encounter when you check into a hotel. However, someone staying at one in Tibet encountered a very unexpected nuisance after a bear managed to invade the building and barged into their room after knocking down the door.
As someone who regularly patrols the Bear Beat at BroBible, I’ve spent years keeping tabs on the many, many ways those animals have managed to cause trouble around the world.
That includes multiple mammals that have set up a den for themselves under homes in California, others that keep attacking tourists who insist on feeding them in the mountains of Romania, and the ones that have triggered a rush for robotic wolves after sparking a bit of a crisis in Japan.
I can’t say I’ve previously come across any noteworthy tales concerning bears in Tibet, but that is no longer the case thanks to an incident that recently unfolded there.
Someone staying at a hotel in Tibet came face-to-face with a bear that broke down the door to their room
According to a study that was released earlier this year, the Tibetan Plateau, the approximately 970,000-square-mile expanse located north of the Himalayas, is thought to be home to around 6,300 members of the distinct species of brown bear that has managed to adapt to its fairly unforgiving climate.
That same report notes Tibetan brown bears “frequently come into conflict with nomadic herders and high-altitude communities,” and also cites incidents where animals have broken into homes in search of a meal.
It had nothing to say about bears that have invaded hotels while hunting for food, but according to UPI, we were treated to one such case thanks to what went down in the prefecture-level city (the name given to certain places in areas that China has deemed one of its “autonomous regions”) of Nagqu on July 4th.
Surveillance footage captured inside the hotel in question captured a bear repeatedly pounding on the door of an occupied room before it was able to gain entry after breaking it down, and the person inside it reportedly spent a few seconds locking eyes with the animal before it decided to explore the rest of the hotel.
A Tibetan brown bear wandered into a hotel lobby in Nagqu, Tibet, on July 4 before climbing to the second floor and pushing open a guest room door with its paws.
The owner rushed over with a flashlight and tools to scare the bear off. No one was hurt. The hotel has since added… pic.twitter.com/FpUiXtVWDa— Shanghai Daily (@shanghaidaily) July 5, 2026
That break-in occurred after the bear made its way through the front door and ransacked the front desk for some of the water bottles it treated itself to. No one was injured before it was chased off the property, and the owner has apparently taken steps to “bear-proof” the hotel in the wake of the invasion.