The Lady and the Panda Read Online Free PDF

of some repute, was invited for tea and biscuits at the home of a local landowner. When he noticed a great woolly pelt of a black-and-white bear, he immediatelygrasped its significance. Though he would go on to be the first to describe much of this portion of the natural world to the West, and have many species named after him, nothing in his illustrious career would compare to this one dazzling moment of discovery.
    Commissioning a group of hunters, he would within weeks have two skins of his own—one of a young bear, another of an adult. He wrote in his diary that this “must be a new species of
Ursus,
very remarkable not only because of its color, but also for its paws, which are hairy underneath, and for other characters.”
    He named the species
Ursus melanoleucus,
or black-and-white bear, and shipped the pelts off to Alphonse Milne-Edwards at the natural history museum in Paris, gushing that this new creature was “easily the prettiest kind of animal I know.”
    While Milne-Edwards may have agreed with the assessment of the animal's beauty, he objected to the missionary's placement of it within the bear family, launching a debate about its classification—and whether it was closer to a bear or a raccoon—that would live on for more than a century. At the time, there was already one panda known to science, the little raccoonlike red panda. Milne-Edwards wanted the new animal to be called
Ailuropoda
(panda-foot)
melanoleuca
(black and white).
    The creature would come to be known as the great panda, then the giant panda, and very quickly, in the assessment of historians, “the most challenging animal trophy on earth.”
    The appraisal of experts in the field only made it more mesmeric. In 1908 famed botanist Ernest Wilson spent months surveying the kingdom of the panda. “This animal is not common,” he wrote, “and the savage nature of the country it frequents renders the possibility of capture remote.” Despite his extensive wandering in the heart of this habitat, Wilson himself never saw any more of the panda than its dung.
    Still, he would consider himself lucky, for one could encounter worse things than failure when looking for pandas. There were natural calamities, injuries, and often confusion, as the men who came to hunt the panda would find themselves utterly lost in the unforgiving terrain. The best known cautionary story was that of J. W. Brooke, a contemporary ofWilson's, who was killed by Yi tribesmen, then known as Lolo, during his hunting expedition in search of giant pandas and other trophies. Brooke had been arguing with a local chief, and in a Western gesture of conciliation, which did not translate, he reached out to touch the man's shoulder. His faux pas was met with a slashing sword. Injured and shocked, the explorer reflexively shot and killed the chief and then was killed himself by the outraged Yi.
    So elusive was the panda at this point that even “possibly” being the first westerner to see one alive in the wild was an honor. And over the next few years, two men made that claim: brigadier general George Pereira, the British military attaché in Peking, and J. Huston Edgar.
    Spotting something that looked like a giant panda in the fork of an oak tree a hundred yards away inspired Edgar to write the poem “Waiting for the Panda,” which read in part:
    “You may wait 'till doomsday,
Yes, and miss him then.”
    Considering how many people had tramped through bamboo forests without coming upon a giant panda, it was natural for some to wonder if the animal had gone extinct, or perhaps never actually existed at all. Perhaps it was just “a fabulous animal,”
The New York Times
speculated, “like the unicorn or the Chinese dragon.” As doubtful,
The Washington Post
said, as a sea serpent.
    By the time Teddy Roosevelt's sons Kermit and Theodore decided to step in, “the world was agog with expectation.”
    In the late 1920s, just returning from a central Asian expedition, the brothers