The Lady and the Panda

  PRAISE FOR

  THE LADY AND THE PANDA

  “Evocative and satisfying, The Lady and the Panda is the sort of adventure story that cries out for a film version starring Kate Hepburn.…Croke's book offers drama, pathos, even a doomed romance in a remote bamboo forest.”

  —PEOPLE

  “The Lady and the Panda winds up stranger than fiction but no less poignant.… Like its heroine, it stakes everything on exotic glamour.”

  —THE NEW YORK TIMES

  “[Croke's] arresting accomplishment is to capture the excitement of the true adventure story while dismantling the bigotry behind it.”

  —THE BOSTON SUNDAY GLOBE

  “An ingenious story …Vicki Constantine Croke's account of Ruth Harkness' obsessional journey belongs on every animal freak's bookshelf.”

  —NEWSDAY

  “Croke's research puts a human touch on a most unexpected explorer.… A compelling read not only on pandas, but about the person The Washington Post described as someone who had made the world ‘panda conscious.’ ”

  —ALBUQUERQUE JOURNAL

  “Croke tells the story well, provides an abundance of panda lore and touches on all the relevant issues—environmental awareness, cultural imperialism, racism, sexism—without heavy-handedness.”

  —THE INDIANAPOLIS STAR

  “[Croke] spins an engaging yarn about her intrepid hero, and does so with verve and empathy, as well as a good amount of panda particulars.”

  —BOSTON MAGAZINE

  “Croke opens a window into China.… She handles a mass of historical and cultural materials, integrating it well with the narrative of Harkness' life.”

  —MINNEAPOLIS STAR TRIBUNE

  “Thoroughly detailed and researched.”

  —THE OREGONIAN

  “The Lady and the Panda presents an extraordinarily independent woman and an explorer who, herself, is well worth exploring.”

  —THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT

  “In dusting off this exciting tale, Constantine Croke returns Harkness to her rightful place in the top rank of zoological explorers.”

  —PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

  “Kudos are due for recovering the story of a larger-than-life woman and her tiny, famous panda bear.”

  —KIRKUS REVIEWS

  “Croke has created an exciting tale, full of the color and spectacle of a lost, exotic era and place.”

  —BOOKLIST

  “This well-written, exhaustively researched and documented book should be on every library's shelves.”

  —LIBRARY JOURNAL

  “Exotic, romantic, and vivid, The Lady and the Panda presents a wonderful tale of a remarkable woman and her remarkable adventure. Vicki Croke takes readers on a thrilling vicarious journey through the China of a very different time.”

  —SUSAN ORLEAN, author of THE ORCHID THIEF

  “A remarkable journey beautifully described, The Lady and the Panda brings to life one of the most astonishing and overlooked stories of American adventure, the 1936 quest by Ruth Harkness to bring a giant panda to America. Vicki Constantine Croke's canvas is the mystical and wondrous China of the 1930s, her heroine a most remarkable woman, and her gift the ability to understand that this is a great love story.”

  —ROBERT KURSON, author ofSHADOW DIVERS

  “Mesmerizing. Vicki Croke has done a magnificent job of immersing the reader in an absolutely fascinating world. I found myself completely absorbed and could not stop reading. Amazing.”

  —JEFFREY MOUSSAIEFF MASSON, author of WHEN ELEPHANTS WEEP

  “Ruth Harkness, the New York socialite who journeyed into the wilds of China to bring the giant panda to America, now has the biography she deserves. In Croke's hands, the intrepid American woman and the con men, dreamers, and adventurers who joined her in the pursuit of the world's most exotic animal spring vividly to life. Part Hemingway, part Treasure of the Sierra Madre, The Lady and the Panda is a rare blend of adventure, biography, and zoology. A deeply satisfying read.”

  —STELLA DONG, author of SHANGHAI

  ALSO BY VICKI CONSTANTINE CROKE

  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

  China is a country of unforgettable color, and often, quite unbidden, come vivid pictures to my mind—sometimes it is the golden roofs of the Imperial City in Peking, or again it is the yellow corn on the flat-roofed little stone houses in the country of the Tibetan border land.

  —RUTH HARKNESS

  CONTENTS

  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

  AUTHOR'S NOTE

  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.

  PREFACE

  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 Joh
nson'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.

  CHAPTER ONE

  DEATH IN SHANGHAI

  IT WAS A BITTER WINTER NIGHT, February 19, 1936, and on the outskirts of Shanghai, far from the neon and the wailing jazz, thirty-four-year-old William Harvest Harkness, Jr., lay in a private hospital, blood-stiffened silk sutures tracking across his pale abdomen. He was dying, and alone in his agony. His original expedition mates, four adventurous men with dreams of capturing the giant panda, had all deserted him long before. Though he
knew people in the city from previous trips and more recent escapades in notorious nightclubs and bars, in the end he had stayed true to some deeper nature, pushing them all away and stealing off in secret. His family, including his young wife back in Manhattan, had no idea he was even sick. With what little strength he could summon, he had been writing sunny notes home that masked his horrible condition. Perhaps he really believed his own words, for just weeks earlier he had been pressuring the doctor to release him so he could get back to his campaign. But, finally, on this frigid night, scarred by other attempts to scalpel tumors from his neck and torso and wretched from his latest incision, he found himself unable to eat or drink, then even to breathe. The sportsman who lived to rough it in the wild died under starched white sheets, in a ward reeking of antiseptic. His young life had ended in the pursuit of the most mysterious animal of his time, yet he had never managed to set a laced boot in the great snow-covered mountains that separated China and Tibet.

  A world away, back in the noise and lights and rush of Manhattan, it had been an even chillier winter, one of the snowiest and coldest anyone could remember. Late in the afternoon, on the very day her husband took his last breath, Ruth Harkness was making her way home from a salon where she had enjoyed a luxurious shampoo. Bundled up, she happily picked her way along icy sidewalks that were dusted with ash for traction and walled in by freshly shoveled snow. Friends were due for cocktails shortly, and in the larger scheme of things, she had even more to look forward to. Now that things were beginning to go well for Bill, she thought, he might just be home within months. Then the two of them could travel the world as they had always imagined.