|
The panda
has long been known in China. A dictionary, the Er Ya from
the Qin Dynasty, mentions the panda, known as mo, in about
220 BC, and during the Western Han dynasty (206 BC to 24 AD),
the emperor's garden in Xian is said to have housed a panda.
The grandson
of Tang Taicong, the first emperor of the Tang dynasty (618
to 907 AD) may have sent two live pandas to Japan as a token
of friendship, a gesture not repeated by China until the 1950s.
In spite
of this ancient knowledge and the panda's striking appearance,
the animal remained a creature of shadow rather than substance.
Chinese scrolls are crowded with tigers, cranes, turtles,
and others that have spiritual resonance in allegory, but
the panda is not among them. It seldom appeared in art until
the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps its fogbound mountain forests
were too remote and its
habits too elusive.
|
|
On 11
March 1869, a hunter brought a panda skin to the French Jesuit
missionary Armand David who realized that the "fameux
ours blanc et noir" was unknown to Western science. The
discovery sparked a controversy about whether the panda is
an "ours" (bear) or a member of the raccoon family.
The issue was not resolved until over 100 years later when
DNA analysis revealed the panda as an early branch of the
bear family. However, the panda itself retained its aura of
mystery.
On 13
April 1929, the Roosevelt brothers, Theodore and Kermit, were
the first foreigners to shoot a panda. During the next few
years, the acquisition of their trophy led to several other
hunts, sponsored by American museums.
The event
that ultimately made the panda an icon of WWF and the conservation
movement, as well as helping to evoke universal
sympathy for the plight of the species, was the capture of
an infant panda by Ruth Harkness in 1936. When she brought
Su Lin, as it was named, to the United States, the animal
enchanted the nation, creating a panda
cult that survives still. It also led to an undisciplined
international scramble by zoos to exhibit pandas.
Between
1936 and 1946 a total of 14 pandas were taken from China by
foreigners during a period of political turmoil. Then the
country closed its doors to such exploitation. But within
a decade, China began to use
pandas as goodwill ambassadors, giving pairs to Russia, United
States, Mexico, Berlin and others, a total of 24 between 1957
and 1983. Yet the panda as a species in the wild remained
little known.
In the
mid-1970s a number of pandas starved in the northern part
of the animal's range after bamboo mass-flowered and died,
as it does periodically, only to sprout again from seeds.
A census at that time gave an estimate of about 1000 animals,
a figure certainly too low, but it alerted the government
to the panda's precarious position. Concerned about the survival
of a species considered to be a national treasure and whose
future was solely its responsibility, China initiated a panda
study in 1978. A field camp was built on a steep, forested
slope in the Wolong Reserve.
|
The
capture of an infant panda by Ruth Harkness in 1936 helped
to evoke universal sympathy for the plight of the species.
|
