Nathalia Holt’s book begins irresistibly. The year is 1928. Two sons of Theodore Roosevelt called Ted and Kermit – yes I know we’re thinking it’s a Wes Anderson movie – have smoothed a map out on the table in front of them. Let’s imagine the setting is a bit like the Explorers’ Club in New York, with exotic anthropological curios on the walls – poisoned spears and wooden shields – and globes the size of beach balls lit up from within.
The land they are examining is mainly coloured in greens, browns and greys. But running across the map, like the stripes of a tiger, are irregular white blotches. Each of these blank spaces represents terra incognita. This is China, or what was then known of it. And from somewhere deep within those blanks on the map have come persistent rumours of an animal so exotic and large it seems extraordinary nobody has reported on it properly before.
The animal the Roosevelt brothers coveted looked like no other species in the world: a black-and-white bear so rare many people did not believe it was real. This legendary creature was called the giant panda. Rumours swirled about the mysterious animal. No one, not even naturalists who had worked in China all their lives, could say precisely where it lived, what it ate or how it behaved.
For centuries the world had known about other strange bears. Ptolemy II of Egypt had a polar bear in his zoo in Alexandria as early as 285 BC. In 1252, a polar bear was part of the Tower of London’s extensive menagerie. But the same could not be said of the panda. Even among those living in China, spanning some 7.7 per cent of Earth’s landmass, few had ever caught sight of it. There was no rendition of this endearing beast in any of imperial China’s illustrated natural histories stretching back millennia, despite its being such an obviously arresting subject.
In 1916, a party of German explorers travelled to China and Tibet in search of it. But no matter how hard they looked, they could find no evidence. In the small village of Lianghoku, their leader, Walther Stozner, asked some local hunters to bring them pandas, dead or alive. The hunters returned with several dead ones, along with one very young living cub. The Germans tried to feed it milk, then a flour slurry, and finally sought out a human wet nurse, but all their efforts failed. A few days later it died.
The Roosevelts set out to put this right. They had family form in such matters. Their father Teddy had mounted expeditions to the Amazon, in an age when American presidents could behave eccentrically – long past, of course. And it’s hardly a spoiler to reveal that they succeeded, although with unintended consequences. The first pandas brought back to the United States all died in captivity, as their keepers did not know how to look after them.
It is true that giant pandas are now the dazzling poster boys and girls of worldwide conservation; that they have been taken off the critically endangered list; and that, as earnest zoologists keep insisting, we should be ‘remembering the protozoa’ and less glamorous species. But pandas remain iconic for a reason, being waywardly perverse in their rare bamboo diet and equally herbivorous in their sexuality. In 1974, London Zoo attracted record crowds, so great was the excitement over the arrival of Chia Chia – ‘Most Excellent and Very Good’ – and Ching Ching.
Holt’s delightful, well-written book reminds us of a time when
the world was full of explorers, all examining maps like the ones the Roosevelts possessed. There was a heady, optimistic feeling that persisted among them. No one could be certain which mountain was the tallest on Earth, nor which trench in the ocean the deepest. Every expedition held the possibility of making its members world-famous explorers.
While those days are past, it would be dangerous to suppose we know the planet as well as we think. Every generation has assumed there was nothing left to find, and has been proved wrong. There may not be any unknown animals the size of giant pandas still out there; but there could be some interesting protozoa.
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