PANDAS AND THE WEST: FIRST ENCOUNTERS, PANDEMONIUM, DIPLOMACY

PANDAS AND PÈRE ARMAND DAVID

giant panda as it appeared in the formal scientific description of the species, published in the early 1870s. Illustration: H Milne-Edwards and A Milne-Edwards

The first report of a panda in the West came in 1869 from Père Armand David (1826-1900), a French missionary priest and explorer, who was shown two female specimens shot by Chinese hunters. He wrote he'd seen "the prettiest kind of animal I know” and said he “wanted to kill this carnivore.” He sent some skins and bones to Paris.

The modern name giant panda is attributed to David , who lived in China for 12 years from 1862 to 1874. Preaching in Beijing and Shanghai, David was also a correspondent researcher of the National Museum of France. A natural historian, David has found 68 new species of birds, over one hundred species of insects, and many mammal species — including the Milu deer, golden monkey and the giant pandas — in various places of China. In March 1869, David came to the catholic church in Dengchigou of Muping (now Banshan County) of Sichuan and became the fourth preaching priest there. The Dengchigou Catholic Church was one of the earliest churches secretly built by the Cathedral Church of France in Sichuan.[Source: Science Museum of China kepu.net.cn]

In his journal,David wrote: "On March 11, 1869, when I was on my way back to the Church, I was invited to have a rest in a Mr. Li's home. In his home, I saw the panda's skin. It's big and beautiful colored black and white. The skin was quite peculiar. Li told me that I would see this animal very soon, for his hunters were going to hunt this animal!it seemed that a new species in the science domain will be found!"

In his Journal of March 23, 1869, David wrote: "After leaving for 10 days, the hunters were back today. They brought a young whitebear to me. It was caught alive, but was killed only to bring it back more easily." David pitied the death of the young panda cub, and he wrote on: "they sold the young whitebear to me at a very high price. The body of the whitebear was all white except that the legs, the ears and the places around its two eyes are black. It has the same skin color as a grown-up bear that I have seen before. I believe it to be a new species, not only because of its skin color, but also because of the hair beneath its feet and other characteristics.

David sent this specimen of whitebear to Melne Edwards, the director of the Natural Museum of Paris, who studied the skin and skeleton of the animal and published a paper in 1870, announcing "in terms of external features, it is really very close to bears; but its skeleton and teeth are apparently different from bears — actually very close to raccoons. It must be a new species, and I name it Ailuropoda." Paying tribute to David's contribution, Edwards named the scientific name of the Giant panda as Ailuropoda melanoleuca David, which has been used utill now. The first giant panda specimen collected by David is still kept in the Natural Museum of Paris.

Pandas and the West

After David introduced the giant panda to the world, a "giant panda mania" swept some western countries.. Many zoologists, explorers, travelers and hunters came to China from far away, with the purpose of catching a rare giant panda. However, it's very hard to find giant pandas because they usually live alone in the thick forest of mountain areas. [Source: Science Museum of China kepu.net.cn]

WWF symbol Two Russian got a giant panda fur in an area around Pingwu and Songpan of Sichuan Province. German zoologist Hugo Weigold caught a live giant panda in Wenchuan of Sichuan Province and became the first westerner to own a live panda. The foreigner who obtained most giant pandas from China was Briton F.T. Smith. He stayed for 20 years an area where giant pandas lived and was called "King of Giant Pandas" by the westerners. From 1936 to 1938, Smith bought 12 live giant pandas in Wenchan of Sichuan Province. Of these only six made it to Britain alive.

Several hunting expedition were launched. They were unable to bag a pandas. Finally in 1929, Theodore Roosevelt's sons, Kermit and Theodore Jr., killed a panda on a hunting expedition They were the first two Americans who came to China to hunt giant pandas. In 1928, Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, traveled to Baoshan county of Sichuan but failed to get a giant panda. The two then went to Yuexi county of the Liangshan Mountain where they killed a grown-up female panda, and wrote the first description of a a Westerner killing a panda. Afterward, two more the Roosevelt brothers, Sage and Sheldon, Shaffer from Germany, and Brockhurst from UK all came to China and killed giant pandas. Some Westerners who killed or hunted giant pandas sold their skins and parts to Chinese for very high prices.

Pandemonium

The word pandemonium was coined in 1936 to describe the reception a panda received when it was first shown in the West. The first panda to be seen in Europe and America was a cub named Su-Lin ("something very cute"), brought from Sichuan province by a rich socialite named Ruth Harkness. With extensive media coverage the cub was first displayed at the Chicago zoo, drawing a crowd of 54,000, a number that has yet to be repeated. While cameras clicked away, Harkness, dressed in a fur with a cigarette dangling from her lips, fed the panda with a baby bottle.

Harkness, whose husband had been killed in a panda hunting expedition in China, became a big celebrity. Describing how she found the animal in bamboo thicket, she wrote in her book: "I stumbled blinded, brushing the water from my face and eyes. Then I stopped, frozen in my tracks. From the old dead tree came a baby's whimper." In reality she is believed to have purchased the cub from a Chinese hunter who had reportedly captured the animal for Floyd Tangier Smith, one of Harkness's rivals in the quest to bring back the first live panda.

Harkness's husband William Harkness was an adventurer and a zoologist. They set off to China to capture giant pandas soon after they were married. Before Ruth Harkness began her quest for the panda she had never been abroad and never tracked an animal. After her arrival in China she wrote a friend: “I am so damn glad to be alive, and in China, and about to stalk a panda, I could scream and yell and howl with joy.” Tying up much of her inheritance in the project she teamed up with a 22-year-old Chinese hunter who became her lover, and headed off to the mountains of Sichuan from Shanghai with 16 coolies and a cook. Harkness sold Su-Lin to a Chicago zoo for $14,000 (the animal died a year later).

Harkness traveled into Wenchuang County of Sichuan Province, then to Baoxing county where David found the first panda. She eventually got her hands on a less-than-two-pound panda cub that had been born for about 30 days in the bamboo forest 2 kilometers from the Jiajin Mountain. So excited, Ruth took care of the panda cub like her own baby. In her journal, she wrote, "it has a black-and-white ball-like head. When rubbing its nose over my shirt, it often finds my breast by instinct. With the help of her friends, Ruth bribed the custom officers and took Sulin on the ship and then outside China. The panda cub Sulin was carried through in a bamboo basket but customs recorded "taking along a barking dog."

In the spring of 1937, Sulin was exhibited in the Chicago Zoo of the United States and soon became a star of the city, attracting as many as 40,000 visitors to the zoo. The story of Sulin and Ruth encouraged the hunting and capturing of pandas. Between 1936 and 1941, Americans alone took nine living pandas from China. According to Chinese statistics, between 1869 to 1946, more than 200 foreigners had come to the panda habitat in China to investigate, collect information, hunt, kill or buy living giant pandas or panda specimens. Sixteen living giant pandas were taken from China 1936 to 1946. By 1949, 73 pandas had left China and many others had been killed by Western hunters. Today, at least 70 giant panda specimens are possessed by Foreign museums.

Pandemonium remains very much alive in China. Images of pandas are stamped on everything from key chains to chocolates. Lesser Panda cigarettes and Pride-band cigarettes both have pictures of a panda on the package. In 2002, the first international panda festival was held. Scientists say that teddy bears and pandas are so adored by humans because their big eyes, large round head, soft, flat features without a strong nose or chin are similar to features typically found on human babies and that the adoration is a form of the maternal nurturing instinct.

Book: “The Lady and the Panda” by Vicki Constantine Croke (Random House, 2005).

Fund-Raising and Pandas

Much of the money earmarked for panda conservation comes from sources outside of China. For a time China’s support was less than what many people expected. A former World Wildlife Fund official told the Washington Post in the 1990s, "The Chinese are pointing a gun to the head of the panda and saying, 'If you want to keep it, fund it. Otherwise we're going to let it go.'" These days the Chinese government is very much invloved in protecting and saving pandas.

Millions of dollars has been raised by conservation groups to help the panda. In the Pennies for Panda fund raising drive, American school children gave five million pennies to help save the panda. The World Wildlife Fund uses the panda as its symbol and has helped raise millions of dollars to help pandas and dozens of other endangered animals.

The giant panda is one of the best-known symbols in the world, used to sell everything from electronic goods to fizzy drinks, chocolate to biscuits, licorice to cigarettes — not to mention global conservation. The Chengdu research Base of Giant Panda Breeding sells odor-free souvenirs such as photo frames, bookmarks and Olympics-themed statues made form panda dung.

Rent-a-Panda Program

A "rent a panda" program was set up to earn money for panda research, breeding and projects that help protect and preserve pandas. Pandas have been rented out for as much $1 million a year for a pair. The National Zoo in Washington D.C. and Atlanta Zoo each paid $10 million for two pandas for 10 years. The Ueno Zoo in Tokyo got four pandas for the same price. Zoos in Switzerland, Canada, South Korea, Thailand and the Netherlands have paid $30,000 to $70,000 a month to borrow pandas for up to four months.

The rented pandas are taken from a captive population of about 90 pandas in China. China retains ownership of the pandas and any babies they produce. The process of acquiring a panda can be quite complicated, requiring reams of paperwork and waits of up to several years. Most end up in zoos, but one conservationist said "even state fairs want them."

The process is technically viewed as a partnerships between the Chinese government and the participating zoo or country. Money earned from the rent-panda programs is earmarked for panda conservation, training conservationists, installing communications networks, creating environmental education programs for schools near protected areas, and restoring degraded bamboo forests.

Some have complained that the program has been used to make large profits for zoos. When the San Diego rented a pair of pandas for 200 days in 1987 and 1988 attendance increased by a third and the zoo made more than $5 million through the sale of panda T-shirts and other merchandise.

For a while the program was shut down on the grounds that animals captured for captivity contributed to the extinction of the species. The United States banned the import of pandas for five years in the 1990s. Only after certain rules were implemented was the program restarted. One of the central rules now is that pandas must have come from captivity not the wild.

In September 2007 the Chinese government said it would no longer give out pandas as gifts. One official said the animals would only be lent out for “breeding and biological research.” In 2012, a pair of pandas was given to a zoo in Edinburgh, Scotland on a ten-year loan after five years of negotiations and a detailed inspection of the zoo by Chinese officials.

Panda Diplomacy

The Chinese government likes to uses pandas as a diplomatic gesture and periodically Beijing gives a pair of pandas to countries as a sign of goodwill. The tradition dates back to A.D. 685 when Tang Dynasty Empress Wu Zetian gave two pandas to the Emperor of Japan. She is described as the first Chinese ruler to practice panda diplomacy. In 1941, China gave a panda to the Bronx Zoo as a gesture of thanks to the United States for its help during World War II. In the 1950s, pandas were given as gifts to Communist allies such as North Korea and the Soviet Union.

Between 1958 and 1982, Beijing sent pandas to nine countries, including Japan and Mexico, One of the primary goals of a visit by British Prime Minister Edward Heath to China in 1974 was to secure a panda. As of the early 2000s, there were pandas in the United States, Mexico, Japan, Germany, Austria and Thailand. They like all pandas are property of the Chinese government. Offspring of pandas born outside China are allowed to live with their parents for two years but after that they can be called back to China at any time.

The Chinese government offered a pair of pandas to Taiwan as a present when Taiwan’s Kuomintang leader Lien Chen visited China in 2005. In March 2006, Taiwan turned down the pandas, citing a lack of a proper place to keep them and saying China should allow a pair of pandas to remain in the wild rather than give a pair to Taiwan. The Taiwanese President Chen Shui-ban said the move was propaganda to hide China’s intent to attack Taiwan. One Taiwanese lawmaker told the Los Angeles Times, “The pandas are a trick, just like the Trojan horse. Pandas are cute, but they are meant to destroy Taiwan’s psychological defenses.” Most ordinary Taiwanese disagreed,. One poll found that 70 percent of Taiwanese were in favor of accepting the pandas. Beijing scored a number of public relations points as it made public news about “trial marriages” to find the ideal pair to give Taiwan and gave details of their personalities, chemistry, hobbies (tree climbing) and even “language lessons” on Taiwan’s Minnan dialect.

China renewed its panda offer after a new president was elected in Taiwan in 2008 and the same year the giant pandas Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan were sent from the mainland to Taiwan in 2008 as part of an exchange program. IIn China, a country where people are not allowed to vote for leaders, Chinese were asked to vote for the names they liked best for the pandas given to Taiwan. The winning names — Tuan Tuan and Yuan Yuan — were announced before hundreds of millions of viewers on China annual Chinese New Year television show.

Pandas and the United States

For a long time the most famous pandas in the United States were Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, a male-female pair given by China to the American people in 1972 after Nixon's historic visit to China. The pandas went a long way towards warming relations between the United States and China. Some have said they did more for Sino-American relations than Henry Kissinger and should have been considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. In return, the United States gave China a pair of musk oxen.

Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing were placed in the National Zoo in Washington D.C. Nixon never went to see them but his wife did. Ling-ling died in 1992 of a heart attack. She had five babies in four pregnancies. None survived more than four days. Hsing-Hsing died in 1999 at the age of 28 after a long bout with kidney disease. In 2000, the Washington zoo welcomed a new pair of pandas — Mei Xiang and Tian Tian-obtained for $10 million for 10 years through the Rent-a-Panda program.

As of 2006, there were 10 pandas in the United States: two in Washington, two in Atlanta, two in Memphis and four in San Diego. The San Diego Zoo said goodbye to its last two panda in 2019. A big deal was made about how sad everyone was about sending back Tai Shan to China. Tai Shan from the National Zoo in Washington and another young panda born at a zoo in Atlanta were flown back to China in February 2010.

As of early 2024, only four giant pandas were in the United States, all at the zoo in Atlanta. In June, 2024, China sent the San Diego Zoo the first pair of pandas to enter America in 21 years. In January 2025, two new giant pandas from China made their debut in Washington D.C.'s National Zoo. The bears had arrived in Washington D.C. in October 2024, but spent several months acclimating before being introduced to crowds. It's the latest in the "panda diplomacy" between China and the U.S. [Source: CBS News Videos, January 25, 2025]

As of 2006, only four pandas had been bred in captivity in the United States (three in San Diego and one on Washington). In the summer of 2005, a baby panda named Tai Shan was born to Tian Tian and Mei Xiang at the National Zoo in Washington. The cub was monitored round the clock by closed circuit cameras with volunteer researchers recording every yawn and paw twitch and other behaviors they observed. A half million people came to see her at the zoo in the first four months after her public debut. Millions have watched her on the “panda cam” on the zoo’s web site.

Image Sources: WWF, Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: Animal Diversity Web animaldiversity.org ; National Geographic, Live Science, Natural History magazine, CNTO (China National Tourism Administration) David Attenborough books, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Smithsonian magazine, Discover magazine, The New Yorker, Time, BBC, CNN, Reuters, Associated Press, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, Wikipedia, The Guardian, Top Secret Animal Attack Files website and various books and other publications.

Last updated March 2025