Liam Shaw: I just wanted to touch it

Liam Shaw

Henry Kissinger said that Zhou Enlai had an extraordinary capacity to ‘intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number’. He may have learned about Pat Nixon’s love of pandas on the first evening of the presidential visit in 1972, as they chatted over shark’s fin soup and the People’s Liberation Army Band played ‘Home on the Range’. But he probably already knew how desperate the Americans were to get their hands on one of the few commodities the world’s largest economy couldn’t produce. The following day, the first lady announced to reporters that two pandas were going to be presented to the people of America. Zhou let the US retain its dignity by framing the gift as a thank you for two large and smelly musk oxen the Americans had just given Beijing Zoo, but it was clear whose animals were the real prize. Pat made sure she was present when the pandas arrived later that year, describing her delight when the ‘comic little things’ were served cinnamon toast. In her welcome address, she told the crowd that the pandas would be for ‘children of all ages to enjoy and I include myself in that category … I think “panda-monium” is going to break out right here at the zoo.’

The only other countries that had pandas in 1972 were the USSR, North Korea and Britain. London’s best-known panda, Chi Chi, had been acquired outside the diplomatic system in 1958, when an Austrian dealer had exchanged some African big game for a young female panda which was shipped to Frankfurt. He had hoped to sell her to an American zoo, but the State Department blocked the sale on the grounds that she fell under the embargo on Chinese goods. The dealer leased her to various European zoos before London Zoo acquired her permanently. As Henry Nicholl recounts in The Way of the Panda (2010), baby Chi Chi was fed a diet of bamboo from a Cornish estate (harvested by a local scout troop), supplemented with porridge, eggs, chicken and lots of chocolate. Chi Chi became a superstar, despite the fact that she spent most of her time sleeping – a Granada TV producer recalled that she had to be ‘poked out and woken up in order to appear to be animate’. She was even responsible for a temporary suspension of British-Soviet antipathy when zoo authorities tried to get her to mate with Moscow’s panda, An An, in a failed attempt to produce a new panda outside China’s borders.

In the aftermath of Nixon’s trip, China gave pandas to Japan, West Germany, Spain, France, the UK and Mexico. But though the panda had become a new diplomatic gold standard, its exchange value was difficult to quantify. (An American zoo offered a thousand Holstein cows for a pair, but it was a seller’s market.) By the mid-1980s, the Chinese government had realised it could extract rent. Pandas are no longer given, only sent out on loan, and even cubs born overseas are deemed Chinese. If their lease agreements aren’t renewed they can be expatriated as a sign of diplomatic displeasure, as Japan’s pandas were earlier this year. For the usufructuary right to a panda, a foreign zoo must pay as much as a million dollars a year, with fines of $500,000 if their charge dies owing to human error.

Pandas have good PR, but they’re not as cuddly as people think. They have powerful teeth that can chew things a lot tougher than bamboo. One conservationist described watching a panda eat an aluminium pan (and documented the aluminium nuggets that were excreted a few hours later). Though technically vegetarian, they aren’t squeamish about attacking people. In September 2006, a 35-year-old man jumped into an enclosure at Beijing Zoo and tried to hug Gu Gu, a six-year-old male panda. Gu Gu responded by sinking his canines into the man’s leg and refusing to let go, even after the man tried in desperation to bite him back. Zookeepers eventually sprayed Gu Gu with water and the man was released, but the injuries required skin grafts. ‘No one ever said they would bite people,’ he told reporters. ‘I just wanted to touch it.’ Gu Gu went on to bite two more visitors in three years; on one of these occasions, zookeepers had to use tools to prise apart his jaws. China Daily didn’t feel the need to mention these incidents in its obituary last year, noting that Gu Gu was beloved by visitors for his ‘gentle temperament’.

At the start of the 20th century, the panda was largely unknown to science. The first European to describe it was the French Catholic missionary Armand David, who saw the skin of a black and white bear on display in a house in western China in 1869. He contracted some local hunters to capture and kill one, and sent the body back to Paris so it could be scientifically described. Taxonomists started arguing about whether or not it was a bear. The ninth edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica explained that the species superficially resembled a bear, but was reported to feed on ‘roots, bamboos and other vegetables’ and had anatomical features similar to the red panda, a raccoon-like creature with copper-red fur. The giant panda, as it became known, seemed to be an anomaly, and the lack of information about it wasn’t just Western ignorance of an existing body of knowledge. Though the pages of medieval Chinese encyclopedias are full of unicorns, firebirds and dragons, there are no pandas. Elena Songster notes in Panda Nation (2018) that texts from before the Song dynasty (960-1279) contain descriptions of inchoate creatures like the pixiu (a chimeric panther-bear which could, if you squint, be a giant panda), but more recent texts are ‘devoid of even remote allusions’. The panda was as mysterious within China as it was outside it.

They were still considered near mythic in 1928, when Ted and Kermit Roosevelt, sons of the former president, decided to track one down. As Nathalia Holt explains in The Beast in the Clouds, shooting big game was a Roosevelt family tradition – putatively in the name of science, but also out of a childlike frustration with the day-to-day. In 1925, aged 38 and 36 respectively, Ted and Kermit had killed more than two thousand animals on an expedition to Central Asia. Once back in the US they tried to rejoin everyday life, only for the ‘strange but familiar voices’, as they put it, to begin urging them once more to seek out ‘lonely places where food is scant, travel by foot, and danger a constant bedfellow’. They toyed with crossing Borneo or Angola, but settled on another blank space on the map: the uncharted country between China and Tibet. The ostensible purpose of the expedition was to collect flora and fauna for Chicago’s Field Museum, but the secret purpose was to shoot a panda.

They had an accurate but imprecise idea of the panda’s habitat. Its mountain redoubt was in Sichuan province, on the frontier with Tibet, in a landscape covered with thick bamboo forests shrouded in mist. After arriving in Bombay by ship, they trekked through thick forests and up mountains with a small army of porters and guides, stopping occasionally to pop an endangered river otter with a .22 rifle or to barter with villagers for sacred religious texts. Kermit contracted an intestinal infection, both men suffered from altitude sickness, the mules ran away then came back again. Trailing the Giant Panda, the swashbuckling account the brothers published on their return in 1929, is silent on the political backdrop to their adventures. Although the Kuomintang government in Nanjing claimed nominal sovereignty of Sichuan, it was still under the control of several military groups, and bandits roamed the region. The brothers tended to gloss the risks with feigned insouciance – some of the bandits were ‘of a very milk-and-water variety, a sort of “Pirates of Penzance”’ – but at points hint at the scale of the destruction. Coming across the burned-out town of Shayang, Ted, who had fought on the Western Front in 1918, wrote that ‘the scene was as desolate as the devastated area in France.’

Holt’s book necessarily relies on the Roosevelts’ version of events; it might have been more enlightening simply to republish it with her commentary. She keeps in the brotherly derring-do, while trying to contextualise their behaviour and racist pronouncements (‘Practically all natives steal,’ Ted writes at one point). There was a lot the Roosevelts didn’t know about the people and animals they encountered and Holt supplements their descriptions with her own research. Although these additions are occasionally illuminating, they often produce sentences which verge on nonsensical: ‘As Ted and Kermit watched the dolphin swim, a direct result of brain size and evolution, they had little idea how much the wilderness they hiked through would alter them.’

There are more worrying problems. Holt says she also consulted the brothers’ diaries, but her endnotes cite them only a handful of times, compared to around 130 references to their book, with no page numbers given. Whether by accident or design, that omission obscures the extent to which she remixes their narrative, jumbling events, places and people to the point that her book is strewn with errors. Some are trivial embellishments: when Ted writes of a monkey ‘sinking his sharp teeth into the clothes of an unwary passer-by’, Holt writes that it bit him personally; when he writes that a monk gave him some fabric so he could patch his coat, Holt has the men patching it together. But others seem to be confabulations. For example, the dolphin that Holt claims the brothers watched swimming is, as far as I can tell, entirely her own invention. The Roosevelts mention only that one of their servants told them of a ‘fabulous monster’ that lived in the Mekong, a tale to which they gave little credence. Yet Holt seems inspired by this fragment to write lyrically, over several pages, about an encounter with a river dolphin: ‘Without warning, something flickered at the edge of the water … There was a massive creature down there and its body was silvery white. “It’s a monster,” Kermit said aloud.’

Perhaps Holt felt emboldened by the fantastical events of the original tale. Against all odds, the brothers did find a panda. In April 1929 they arrived in a region they called Yehli, where they’d been told there were pandas, and contracted four local hunters from a small village. The weather was bad and the villagers were reluctant to head out, but it was explained to them that ‘all chance of a golden egg would vanish unless we were taken hunting on the morrow.’ The next morning, the party set off under a thin misty rain. The mood was low until they came across a set of tracks. After following the trail for two and a half hours they arrived at a snowy clearing in the bamboo with several fresh panda droppings, pale-green turds of undigested bamboo and mucus that smelled of grass. The men split up and searched the area. Mokhta Lone, the brothers’ Kashmiri guide, who had travelled with them from Bombay, was by Kermit’s side when one of the hunters beckoned him towards a giant spruce. A panda’s head suddenly emerged. As the sleepy animal climbed out and ambled into the bamboo, Kermit waited for Ted to catch up so they could take aim together. The panda was hit by both the brothers’ shots, and floundered in the snow towards Mokhta, getting within five or six feet of him before they shot it again. It fell and crawled away, but only got 75 yards before it died.

This is the Roosevelts’ version of events. It does seem convenient that they managed not only to bag a panda without recourse to dishonourable tactics such as traps, dogs or snares, but to bring it down together. Holt admits that few of their acquaintances believed this part of the story, but seems content to take the brothers’ version at face value, preferring to imagine its significance for them: ‘The dark reality of what their accomplishment would mean was a phantom darting in front of them, obscuring their vision.’ Worse, she entirely erases the presence of Mokhta Lone, whom the Roosevelts called ‘our faithful companion’ and whom they credited for their chance at the panda. Mokhta is present in the photograph she includes of the dead panda, squatting next to Ted, but Holt mislabels him as an unnamed local ‘Yi hunter’. She emphasises how little credit those who assisted the brothers received. It is disquieting to find that here, as elsewhere in her book, the original narrative gives a fuller account.

When the party returned from the jungle, the locals protested at the bringing of a sacred animal into the village. The usual tradition of sharing some of the meat with the hunting party was broken because nobody could bring themselves to eat it, including Ted and Kermit. On their return, the brothers lectured to packed audiences about their expedition. In Chicago, 1500 people had to be turned away. Other American zoos commissioned their own panda expeditions, driving demand and encouraging further hunting. During China’s civil war, it was relatively easy for foreigners to travel there, but after 1949 Western scientists were locked out by Mao, and became frantic at the prospect that the panda would disappear before they could study it. In the 1980s a joint project between the World Wildlife Fund and the Chinese government led to the first detailed book published in English on the natural history of the panda, which described in detail its almost pathological dependency on bamboo.

Many people still believe, erroneously, that the panda has a death wish, trapping itself on a diet of bamboo which its carnivorous gut can barely digest. ‘Here’s a species that, of its own accord, has gone down an evolutionary cul-de-sac,’ the naturalist Chris Packham said in 2009. ‘It’s not a strong species.’ He later said he would happily eat the last panda if it would mean getting the money spent on panda conservation back. It’s true that the panda is adapted to a particular ecology with a small population size. But criticising it for its reliance on bamboo, which is plentiful, is like criticising blue whales for being overly dependent on krill. The panda’s sudden decline in the 20th century is nothing to do with long-term evolutionary trends and everything to do with people.

It’s also a lie that pandas need human help to reproduce – usually a gloved expert who electroejaculates the male’s penis (small, purple and shaped like a sea anemone). In the wild, female pandas give birth every other year and 60 per cent of cubs survive their first year. The infertility of captive pandas is just another sad proof that captivity dulls the flourishing of animals’ natural potential.

Some people hate the panda for hoovering up conservation funds, but others see it as a success story. In 2016 its conservation status was downgraded from ‘endangered’ to ‘vulnerable’. The number of wild pandas is still disputed, but official estimates suggest there are around two thousand, plus about a thousand that China has bred in captivity. China started its breeding programme in the 1980s, when it outmanoeuvred the WWF into paying for the construction of a research centre and began ‘rescuing’ pandas from the wild into its concrete rooms, despite the outcry of the American biologist George Schaller, who was trying to study the same individuals in their natural habitat. Swelling the reserves of captive individuals may have done little for the survival of the species in the wild, but it increased the liquidity of China’s panda capital and ensured the panda would survive in some form when its numbers looked dangerously low. Now China trumpets its technocratic approach to conservation. Perhaps because of the panda’s lack of cultural associations before the 20th century, it has become the CCP’s bureaucratic mascot, a totem of humanity’s domination of nature.

Since 1963, China has created 67 nature reserves for pandas, but they cover only around half their existing habitat. Their forests have been sliced up by roads and ringed with new settlements, so that some wild pandas live surprisingly close to villages. That proximity has had repercussions for their behaviour: in 2017, a panda in Lehsan killed and ate a goat. Protecting animals is one thing, but truly preserving their way of life can be almost impossible. In 1894, after pressure from campaigners, including Teddy Roosevelt, Congress passed a law to outlaw hunting in Yellowstone National Park. The local grizzlies soon lost their fear of humans and their behaviour changed. Roosevelt noted that they had turned to scavenging for scraps of food like hogs. ‘It did not seem natural to be in close proximity with animals esteemed so ferocious,’ one hunter said, having stood watching several bears eating from a refuse heap. Some were even bolder. One bear, Roosevelt said, had begun going into the kitchen of the Geyser Hotel, ‘where he is fed on pies’.

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