The Lady and the Panda

The Modern Ark: The Story of Zoos:
Past, Present and Future

Animal ER: Extraordinary Stories of Hope
and Healing from One of the World's
Leading Veterinary Hospitals

Dogs Up Close

Cats Up Close

FOR MY SISTER, LINDA BIAND

Author's Note

Preface

Map

CHAPTER ONE:
Death in Shanghai

CHAPTER TWO:
Inheriting an Expedition

CHAPTER THREE:
Gaining the Whip Hand

CHAPTER FOUR:
West to Chengdu

CHAPTER FIVE:
Rivalry and Romance

CHAPTER SIX:
A Gift from the Spirits

CHAPTER SEVEN:
The Battle Royal

CHAPTER EIGHT:
Animal of the Century

CHAPTER NINE:
Bombs Rain from the Heavens

CHAPTER TEN:
Saigon to Chengdu

CHAPTER ELEVEN:
High-Altitude Hell

CHAPTER TWELVE:
One Grand Thrill

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:
Hello, I Must Be Going

CHAPTER FOURTEEN:
The Back of Beyond

EPILOGUE
: Song of the Soul

Acknowledgments

Notes

A NOTE ON CHINESE TERMS
: During Ruth Harkness's time in the East, the standard method for the phonetic notation and transliteration of Mandarin Chinese words was the Wade-Giles system, which brought us Peking, Whangpu, and Chungking. Today, the standard is Pinyin, which spells those places Beijing, Huangpu, and Chongqing. This book uses both depending on the context.

SOME MOMENTOUS ENCOUNTERS
feel that way from the start. And so it was for me and the story of Ruth Harkness. In the spring of 1993, while researching a book about zoos, I came across a tantalizing story that even in the barest outline electrified me. In a special anniversary issue of the magazine published by Chicago's Brookfield Zoo, and in a follow-up conversation with the zoo's marketing director, I learned of Harkness, a dress designer and socialite, who in 1936 took over her dead husband's expedition to the border of China and Tibet and captured the first giant panda to be seen in the West. At the time, the panda hunter was an international sensation, and the panda himself once drew more than 53,000 visitors when first displayed at the Brookfield—a single-day tally the zoo has never again matched.

Harkness's likeness would shine out from newspapers, magazines, newsreels, comic strips, and advertisements. Her panda would make the front pages of the
Chicago Tribune
for a nine-day stretch—something one newspaperman told her wouldn't have been done for anyone else, including the president. No animal in history, the lofty Field Museum reckoned, had gotten such attention. Ruth Harkness would become a hero—an unlikely one, for sure, but Americans have always liked that
kind best. And her accomplishment would be so well known that
The Washington Post
would proclaim that every high school child in the land knew her name. She would succeed, the paper said, in “making the world panda conscious.”

It sounded impossible—not just like fiction but like fantasy.

Yet today, few know anything of the saga.

Growing up, I had loved tales of adventure, particularly those from the animal world: Kipling's
The Jungle Book
or Joy Adamson's
Born Free.
Later, I fell for any story of westerners in the wild, frothy or fusty, scholarly or lowbrow: Osa Johnson's
I Married Adventure,
Jane Goodall's
In the Shadow of Man,
and even Daphne Sheldrick's
Animal Kingdom,
with its instructions for baking a cake while camping on the African veldt.

I really didn't have the time to research Harkness—my zoo book,
The Modern Ark,
had a fast-approaching deadline—but I couldn't stop myself. I ordered a secondhand copy of her 1938 book
The Lady and the Panda
for what seemed the outrageous price of fifty-two dollars. As soon as the volume emerged from its brown paper wrapping, though, it was clear that Ruth Harkness was a good investment. Part Myrna Loy and part Jane Goodall, by turns wisecracking and poetic, smart and brave, she was thoroughly modern in her sensibility. (Her story had none of the reflexive racial bigotry that scarred so many other first-person adventure chronicles of her time.) I felt the tug of something deep, a bond, perhaps, that had crossed the passage of time.

Meanwhile, working on my other book, I was learning that radical changes were taking place at our country's zoos, where simple husbandry had become a sophisticated science. Animal experts were employing cutting-edge technology to understand behavior and to improve zoo inhabitants' nutrition and medical care. Reproduction for captive animals had been altered by the adoption of DNA fingerprinting, artificial insemination, embryo transfers, and egg harvesting. Zoos were saving species the space-age way.

Except, it seemed, for the giant panda. The ancient, inscrutable animals were proving resistant to efforts to induce them to reproduce with any regularity outside their bamboo-covered mountains. The United
States' record was particularly dismal—at that time, not one giant panda baby born in captivity in this country had survived past infancy. (The first, Hua Mei, would arrive in 1999 at the San Diego Zoo.)

The story of Ruth Harkness, that long-forgotten panda-hunting dress designer, kept pushing its way into my consciousness. If the world's top scientists couldn't keep these panda babies alive away from their cold, wild homes, how had a Manhattan party girl managed to do it in 1936? After all, getting baby-panda formula right was something scientists were still puzzling over in the 1990s. Even by the 1980s, nearly fifty years after Harkness's accomplishment, “little was known about the species,” according to the World Wildlife Fund. The more I learned about how perplexed biologists were by the giant panda, the more awed I felt by Harkness's adventure.

It wasn't just that either. Harkness was a captivating character, but her book had covered just one year of her life; everything before and after was a mystery. In fact, there was a great deal about that year in China I wanted to know more about. I had a thousand questions.

Every step of the way, as I unearthed small and large pieces of information, the story grew richer, more fantastical, and more moving. Was it true that she attended black-tie dinners at a palace far out in the Chinese frontier? Did she actually take a panda out of China by registering it as a dog? Could she really have survived a train wreck in the jungles of French Indochina while making her second expedition alone in 1937? The answers were just a sample of many surprises in store for me.

The best of them was the revelation of a cache of hundreds of letters written by Harkness—often on her portable typewriter—over three expeditions to China. Robin Perkins Ugurlu, the granddaughter of Harkness's closest friend, had read an article of mine on Harkness in
The Washington Post Magazine
. When she phoned, we agreed to meet in Cleveland, where her parents live, and where they had kept this treasure safe for more than fifty years. I received the correspondence between Harkness and Hazel Perkins in the afternoon at my hotel and read it straight through, well into the night. The letters were mesmerizing, giving the backstory on many intrigues Harkness had been too ladylike to include
in her book. That summer evening, I began to know Ruth McCombs Harkness not only as a heroic character but also as a flawed, brave, and passionate woman.

Everything in this book is true; nothing has been fictionalized. The research has involved personal letters, books, histories, weather reports, miles of microfilm records of English-language newspapers in Shanghai, magazines, and archival documents from museums, universities, and the municipal library of Shanghai, and the online auction eBay (America's great yard sale).

Standing on her own two feet and saying exactly what she meant, Harkness never required anyone to interpret her words or represent her. But after years of neglect, she did need someone to revive her story. And, considering the praise that conservation insiders voiced for her contribution to the relationship between humankind and nature, I felt driven to do just that.

Harkness has been quietly canonized by the few conservationists, scholars, and zoologists who have fully studied the panda-hunting era. They know that what began in Ruth Harkness's serene mountain camp was an event that would shake the world, helping to change the way Americans perceived the widespread hunting of exotic animals.

The desire to see giant pandas survive, something we take for granted today, was a novel concept in the 1930s when Harkness brought home a little black-and-white bear, not in a cage, not on a leash, but in her arms. She told the world that this creature was not an “it” but an individual with a unique personality. The significance of this shift in perception is incalculable, as the legendary primatologist Jane Goodall realized in the 1960s with the case of chimpanzees. For if each individual matters, then each individual deserves to be saved.

Zoologist and author Desmond Morris, writing with his wife, Ramona, has said that the sight of Harkness's prize, the panda Su-Lin, was a turning point in the timeline of natural history. Blasting away at creatures and stuffing their carcasses in museums was already losing its luster. The emergence of the beloved baby giant panda would, he said, add “a very important nail to the coffin of the ‘huntin’ and shootin' ‘epoch.”

The baby panda captivated people in a way that an adult never would have. Su-Lin “was virtually changing the whole attitude of western civilization towards the species,” the Morrises wrote. “In a few brief moments on the dockside, one animal did more for the cause of nature conservation than most humans could hope to achieve in a lifetime,” author and nature filmmaker Chris Catton said in his book
Pandas.
The World Wildlife Fund, whose very identity is associated with its logo of a giant panda, has said that Su-Lin's arrival helped “evoke universal sympathy for the plight of the species.”

Harkness spoke out about what was in her day a rather alien concept: the conservation of this species. She also did something that most of today's field biologists wouldn't even be aware of. She returned a captured panda to the wild.

At the time of her great fame, Harkness knew she had accomplished more than just winning a footrace for the title of “first.” She would look at the whole matter, as she often tended to do, in a philosophical way, admitting privately that she realized she could claim a “part in giving the animal world a lift on its upward path.”

THERE MAY BE about fifteen hundred giant pandas left in the wild, and the hope is that the world will not allow them to slip away. Millions of dollars have poured into China from organizations like the World Wildlife Fund and the American Zoo and Aquarium Association to help with research and conservation.

This is the legacy of Ruth Harkness. Every time a biologist treks into the bamboo forest, or a conservation group underwrites research, or a child places a nickel in a collection box for giant pandas, Harkness's mission lives on.

Ruth Harkness made history. She thrilled a country desperate for something to cheer about. She did what no other American had been able to do. And she helped a gentle, mysterious species in its fight for survival.