In his youth, during the Japanese occupation, Pan spent much of his time indoors, extensively reading newspapers and literature.

Drawing from the illustrations in these works, he took up sculpture and calligraphy, producing images of Beethoven, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, and Byron.

[2] As a youth, Pan developed romantic feelings for his cousin, A-Mei, who lived with her family in Hong Kong.

[3] During World War II, Pan travelled to Macau, then occupied by the Empire of Japan, in 1944 to visit her;[1] she and her family had relocated during the occupation.

[4] In his early years, he worked under the art name Yunhelou (云鹤楼), which he received from the artist Guan Shanyue [zh].

[2] Pan gained national attention in the 1950s with his Hard Times (艰苦岁月, 1957),[1] which was soon featured in textbooks for primary school students.

[4] By 1960, Pan had begun teaching at the Department of Sculpture, Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts;[4] he later became a tenured professor.

Later that year, Pan and other faculty members of the Guangzhou Academy of Fine Arts used lime water to etch animal shapes from stones in Xianglu Bay [zh] near what is now Zhuhai.

Wu Jianmin [zh], who would become the secretary of the municipal Chinese Communist Party committee, put out calls for a monumental statue that would serve as an icon of the new city.

Ultimately, Pan developed a design – based on a local legend – of a fisherwoman holding a pearl aloft.

Though controversial at the time,[1] the work won Pan a gold medal at the Sixth National Art Exhibition.

This was followed in the 1990s by Wild Geese Landing on Pingsha (雁落平沙), a monument to farmers who had arrived in Pingtang Village beginning in 1955.

Intended as a companion piece to his earlier Zhuhai Fisher Girl, the sculpture depicts the fisherwoman after settling in the region.