The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  The rest of the world did seem to be going mad, with the threat of war growing and the global economy deteriorating. Yet there was a glimmer of hope in this sheltered land that existed on a higher, more benevolent plane. For Ruth Harkness, it was no fantasy. In this place, she would discover for herself “a beautiful forgotten world.”

  IN CHENGDU, it was time to finalize plans.

  Quentin Young, in consultation with an elderly, gray-bearded servant of Cavaliere's, hired sixteen coolies and Wang Whai Hsin, a happy, quirky cook whom Harkness loved from the start.

  The most important decision was where exactly they were going. Since panda country was all around them, Harkness discussed possibilities with Cavaliere. He agreed with the advice of Jack Young—that she should travel southwest along an old trade route toward Kangding, then called Tatsienlu, and make more than a week's journey still southward from there. This was the area that had provided the Roosevelt brothers with their panda and, before them, that famous panda skin of Père David's.

  But for Harkness, in 1936, the first choice wasn't meant to be. The Kangding plan unraveled quickly because of logistics. The only road in this direction was “a government monopoly,” restricted to official vehicles and a single sanctioned bus that was supposed to make the run once a day. Harkness had piles of gear, at least thirty pieces of cargo, which would not fit on the bus.

  It was decided that she was better off heading northwest instead, to the Qionglai Shan range. All recent panda successes had come out of the northwest, in what was known as Wassu land or Wassu country. That was where Floyd Tangier Smith had set up hunters, and where Bill Sheldon of the Sage expedition felt he had found “the best wildlife country in Western China.” The region was much easier to reach, with the line of the mountain chain slanting toward Chengdu at its northern portion, and beginning just sixty-two miles (one hundred kilometers) from the city.

  Throughout this time, Cavaliere threw one dinner party after another. “If I spend everything I have—what an experience it will have been— even till now,” Harkness wrote home. “Can you imagine having left my few dollars in investments, and having a few miserable pennies every month when I can have this?”

  With everything set, Cavaliere orchestrated another gathering. This one included, along with “the usual assortment” of guests, W. H. Campbell, a blue-eyed and very British representative of the League of Nations; a “charming” German engineer; and a glum American pilot.

  Right away, the German bore in on Harkness; he couldn't understand what such an urbane and sophisticated creature was doing in this outpost. As they dined, he interrogated her about her plans. Still wanting to keep a low profile on the expedition, Harkness answered vaguely about having come for the hunting. She couldn't have picked a worse cover. Hunting was the German's passion, and he wanted details on her shooting ability and the arms she had in her possession. Realizing that she wouldn't be able to sustain the ruse—of all the equipment for the trek, the guns had interested Harkness the least—she confessed. She was headed deep into the mountains in pursuit of the giant panda.

  The German—and everyone else, for that matter—was truly baffled. The whole gathering erupted in protective objections from the men. Oh, you'll never come back alive, the pilot warned, backing up his prediction with gruesome tales of other would-be explorers who had vanished in this unforgiving land. The China Press had reported on the warlike people here: “Any man who ventures into their territory may expect to depart therefrom in two sections. It is no wonder that the Lolo country is represented by a blank space even on the best of maps.”

  Wearily, Cavaliere informed the guests that, if he could, he would prevent Harkness from setting out. He had told her it was “foolhardy” to go on. But it had done no good.

  Only reinforcing the skepticism of her dinner companions was Harkness's behavior one night. Irate over animals loosening the gray tiles of his roof, and hearing footsteps above, Cavaliere, in the middle of a party, ran outside with a gun. Taking aim at the culprit, he shot dead a small silver cat, which skidded off its high perch, fell, and crumpled on the walk. Harkness, who was so dedicated to her own cats that she often took them on exotic vacations with her, ran inside the house in tears.

  AT THE WESTERN GATE of Chengdu, a ragtag caravan emerged from the curtain of dust rising in the hazy sunshine. It was made up of sixteen coolies, the rounded form of Wang Whai Hsin, the raven-haired Ruth Harkness (already wearing her blue cotton expedition suit and bamboo rope-soled sandals in place of her walking oxfords), and the dashing Quentin Young, who, throughout the expedition, “was smart in his wellcut breeches, his red-topped socks and little cap that matched.”

  It was eight-thirty on the morning of October 20, and the streets were already choked with travelers. Sichuan, the largest province in China, matching the size of France, had one of the densest rural populations in the world. That was obvious from the foot traffic coming and going to market, the peasants pushing wheelbarrows heavily laden with goods like stones or salt, pigs, and even people. Through this steady stream of humanity, the Harkness expedition aimed itself away from the heat of Chengdu and toward the snowy mountains of Tibet.

  Revitalized by their morning smoke of opium, the coolies worked in twos, each pair lugging as much as 160 pounds between them in a Sichuan-style bamboo contraption called a wha-gar. Basically slings tied between two bamboo poles, wha-gars could hold gear or human riders. Harkness, like many foreigners before her, had at first been troubled by the concept of being carried aloft by the poor men who were smaller than she was and often appeared barely able to stand. But it was common practice, ultimately providing much-needed work for desperately poor people.

  Nonetheless, she decided to walk on that first morning's hike, reasoning that she had better get in shape for the arduous mountain trails ahead. In the slippery bamboo forests she would have to be able to manage on her own. The plan from the start was to cover up to thirty miles a day.

  It took no time at all during this first clip for the caravan to break apart. The long-limbed Young was striding out front, with Harkness bringing up the rear about a mile back and all the coolies somewhere in between. She might not have looked like it right then as she struggled to keep up her pace, but the would-be explorer had become a genuine explorer. Out of Chengdu, with every step, Ruth Harkness was overtaking her husband's progress, drawing ever closer to what she called “the real adventure.”

  Straightaway, Young and Harkness confronted a problem: opium addiction in the ranks. It was the bane of China. Hungry coolies, who earned so little, would forgo food to spend their small wages on the drug aptly called “black rice.” These unhappy souls did the work that strong draft animals would take on in other parts of the world, for here it was cheaper to hire a coolie than to feed a donkey. What it took to survive this lot in life was expressed by the very name “coolie,” which meant “bitter strength.”

  Coolies were considered the lowest of Chinese society, beneath the peasant class, even, which possessed its own kind of spare nobility. These men owned nothing but the tattered blue trousers tied at the waist with rope, straw sandals, a threadbare blue jacket, and the pipes they used to smoke. On frosty nights at higher elevations, they would have to spend some of their few coins renting filthy blankets to pull over their bony, wasted frames. Miserable, wretched, with no hope for a better life and only the fear of their bodies failing them, they found in opium the serenity and the stamina to go on.

  Each day the men were paid a small amount to buy food. Generally, opium would be purchased in three intervals with meals—morning, midday, and midafternoon. The Great Smoke provided calm and clarity, and for the godforsaken coolies there was, after just a few puffs, a release from physical pain too. Harkness saw the transformation herself. One miserable young coolie who had collapsed under the weight of his load in the morning became, following his afternoon smoke, a swaggering strong man hauling the same burden. “How shall a coolie endure life if he has no opium?” a
downtrodden character in the novel Shanghai '37 asked. “Life is too hard without dreams.” Though their behavior was understandable, addicts made for irresponsible workers, often disappearing out from under their loads, never to return.

  Right after lunch this first day, Young had to contend with a porter who decided he wouldn't work anymore. The group had already started back out on the road when Wang came racing up to Harkness, who had given up her march for the comfort of the wha-gar. “One piece coolie no good; he run away,” Wang breathlessly reported. “Too much opium.”

  Furious about the problem this presented to the expedition, Young was also provoked by the issue in general. He was ashamed of the addiction of his fellow countrymen.

  Harkness didn't feel that stigma, obviously, and she would go on to enrage Young during the trip by trying opium herself. In the case of the missing coolie, she saw the problem only from the worker's point of view. Here she was barely managing to carry her own camera, while the porters, all shorter than she, outstripped her with their quick, shortstepped strides, under massive weights. How could she not feel for them? If she were in their situation, she said, she'd “do worse than smoke opium.”

  There was nothing to be done now but redistribute the cargo and go on. Down one coolie, the group continued. That evening they lodged in a dark, low inn with a dirt courtyard. After dining on a hearty bowl of sour egg soup, an exhausted Harkness turned in shortly after sundown. “Last night's Inn was a beauty,” she wrote home the next day. “The ‘rooms’ were indescribable (our coolies slept in them) but Quentin barricaded a corner of the courtyard with our loads, put my camp cot behind, two tables in front on which he slept, all of which did not keep all manner of Chinese from wandering in and out all night—but I slept well and largely from 7:30 to 5:30. It is all very wonderful—even the appalling ‘terlets’ which both men and women use, which are nothing more than pits can't dim the lustre of this particular expedition.”

  It was the life of a soldier now, with the team rising at dawn to head back on the trail. As Harkness stepped along that warm morning, focused on the gleaming clouds on the horizon, it dawned on her that the billowing whiteness wasn't cloud at all but her first glimpse of the great Qionglai Shan, the snowy mountains that she had dreamed of so often in the sweltering heat of Shanghai.

  Her reverie was interrupted, however, right after the midmorning breakfast stop, when two more coolies ran away, forcing the caravan to rely on Sichuan-style wheelbarrows. Out of sixteen porters, three had vanished within forty-eight hours of the expedition's start. Since it was Young's job to manage this campaign, he became grim, realizing that if the defections persisted, the venture could be derailed. He gathered the remaining porters and, brandishing a revolver to punctuate his remarks, told them that if he had to, he would withhold the daily food advance to prevent them from purchasing opium. He made certain that the desperate men understood his authority and the consequences of their actions.

  “Our porters take time out for opium,” Harkness wrote on the back of this snapshot. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  Just miles out of Chengdu, other realities were closing in. Throughout the day, groups of soldiers, some carrying submachine guns, overtook them on the road. Amid reports of bandits in the area, a cluster of military men passed by with two prisoners tied in ropes. Young was alarmed by the steady procession. Bumping along in one of the wheelbarrows, the Sauer rifle cradled in his lap, he begged Harkness to arm herself with any of the other guns. Not only was Harkness untroubled by the bandit report, she thought Young's concern was adorable. What a picture he made, with the gun, the wrinkled brow on that handsome face, and the unruly lock of hair falling across his forehead. In fact, she couldn't resist getting her camera out and taking a snap of him.

  After lunch, however, her camera lens found a very different subject.

  The scene was so unreal to her that she felt unmoved. Sprawled on the road next to an open field and riddled with bullets was the freshly slain body of one of the prisoners who had passed them earlier. He was flat on his back, legs crossed delicately at the ankle, bare feet casually resting one on top of the other. His right arm reached out, and his light cotton shirt was drenched in blood. More blood pooled darkly at his forehead, cheek, and chin; it ran from his torso onto his sleeve, staining the dusty road. “Thirty shots fired—7 hits, and by the look of him, most of them in the face,” she wrote home. “Not very pretty.”

  As bystanders, including shoeless children, stood gawking, Harkness climbed down off her wha-gar to join them. How could she have sobbed over a dead cat, yet stand here looking on impassively, she wondered. Her conclusion was that by now she had absorbed some of the Eastern belief in accepting the inevitable. Grisly as it was, this was the bandit's fate.

  All around the corpse, there was a thrum of excited talk—not over the death but about the circumstances surrounding it. The small crowd relayed that the dead man was the leader of a massive horde of bandits— numbering as many as six hundred—who were rumored to be gathering for his rescue. Throughout the countryside, bandit gangs as large as armies did exist, and the soldiers, panicking at the report, shot him dead, running off before they could be overwhelmed by the lawless mob.

  It was a sobering scenario. The members of the lightly armed and heavily laden Harkness expedition were now determined to stay close to one another for the rest of the journey into the city of Guanxian.

  They made it to their night lodgings there without further incident, taking comfort in the friendly village. A covered bridge containing a thriving marketplace for entering travelers led to the city's magnificent gates, with a massive tower capped by two tiled roofs set wedding-cake style, one smaller pillared layer atop the first. When the caravan found accommodations, they discovered that their day of surprises wasn't over.

  The dead bandit served as a warning to the Harkness expedition. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  Up a ladder, Harkness entered the two tiny chambers that would be home for the evening. As she perched on the edge of her cot holding a tiny ration of hot water with which to attempt something of a bath, she heard a familiar English-accented voice calling “Hello there” from the open courtyard below. It was Campbell, the League of Nations chap she had met at Cavaliere's. “What in Gods name the L of N is doing in this remote and wholly Chinese town I don't know,” Harkness wrote home. Campbell, “a most nice man,” was “looking British and blue eyed as hell.” Harkness, peering over her bowl of now muddied bathing water, apologized for not even being able to offer him a cocktail.

  Campbell volunteered to return her to her old world, out of the wilderness, figuring that two days of rough travel in this country would have been enough to send any Western woman scurrying back to city life. He asked her if she'd come to her senses and decided to retreat to civilization. Of course, she had not. Nothing could tempt her away from her odyssey.

  The gates of Guanxian were a welcome sight. COURTESY MARY LOBISCO

  Campbell accepted her decision, surrendering some mail he had brought along for her and kindly agreeing to post her outgoing letters.

  Harkness and Campbell, likely the only westerners for miles around, did not dine together. Instead, she and Young slipped off for a quiet supper in town alone. They made it a bit of a feast: spiced pork, chicken with bamboo shoots, and cup after cup of hot wine that seemed infused with the flavor of peanuts. Warmed by the wine, and no doubt inspired by the sight of the bandit earlier, the two spoke philosophically about death. Young revealed that, should he die in the field, he would want Diana Chen or, as Harkness referred to her, “the girl in the red sweater,” to have a lock of his hair. The talk of mortality and other loves did not discourage their cozy mood. They returned to the inn at about 8 P.M., relaxing together on Harkness's tiny cot. Sitting at either end, they wrote letters by the light of an oil lamp. With a sense of timelessness suffusing everything, utter peace filled the lines of her letter home to Perkie. “My cot is under the eaves, looking down into the open courtyard
… that is filled with soldiers who are singing and playing a 2 string violin—and above a slim hazy young moon just disappearing over the curling tip of the tile roof.”

  Tomorrow, she would press north for panda country.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  RIVALRY AND ROMANCE

  AS HARKNESS TRAVELED, her movements were being noted, and the information eventually relayed to Shanghai. Gerry Russell, up-country himself, was able to track her whereabouts, reporting them to the by now quite sickly Smith back in the city. The American woman's progress was of considerable interest to the two men she had spurned, and checking up on her would be easy. The local people knew what Harkness was doing “almost from hour to hour,” and the hunters “kept tabs on her movements from minute to minute,” Smith would say later. Beyond field-intelligence gathering, though, there wasn't much Russell could do to thwart her except beat her to the punch, something Smith would have liked to have done himself—if he had been up to it. Smith, the collector who didn't think a woman could be equal to the job, was presently checking himself in to a sanitarium in Shanghai for a week's “rest,” which would be followed by a month of more recuperation at home.

  Unaware of any espionage, Harkness and Young had started their climb toward the mountain passes. Harkness was out in front in the wha-gar and Young was bringing up the rear, with about a mile of road between them. The only sound she heard was the soft, steady shuffling of marching feet. Suddenly, there was the sharp report of Young's revolver—three pops in quick succession—which prompted Harkness to command the coolies to halt. What could it be? A swarm of bandits? She waited in utter anxiety until Young came around the bend of the crooked path accompanied by a Chinese officer, Captain Chien, and a group of fourteen soldiers, all armed. Overjoyed that the signal hadn't been fired because of bandits, she then feared these men had come to suspend the expedition. Perhaps it was her nightmare come true—that she would have to return home, defeated as Bill had been.