The Lady and the Panda

by Vicki Croke

  If anyone in Shanghai hadn't known Harkness was coming, they found out fast enough from the papers. Despite the city's anxiety, word of her arrival was splashed all over the news, sometimes on front pages. She was greeted like a celebrity for two days with headlines like MODERN DIANA RETURNS AND PRES. HOOVER BRINGS NOTABLES FROM AMERICA. It couldn't help but amuse the wry American, who had to share a laugh about it with Perkie. “What a reputation for a quiet little dressmaker,” she wrote.

  THE PROBLEMS STARTED right away, beginning with a jolt—Quentin Young was nowhere to be found. Through her correspondence with him, Harkness had believed they were set to join up in Shanghai before heading into the field together. Among all the cards and phone calls waiting for her when she hit town, however, there was nothing from her old expedition partner. No one seemed to know where he was. “I can't find Quentin although I have tried everything I can think of,” Harkness wrote home. She was in the dark, unable even to track Quentin's brother Jack, who was said to be in Beijing.

  In his dealing with Harkness, Quentin Young would often appear racked by conflict, by turns attentive, then remote. The emotional push and pull would never resolve itself. Many years later, he would still harbor paradoxical feelings about her, dismissing their romance in one breath, but in another asserting that he had considered leaving everything behind in China to chase after her—all the way back to America.

  The high tide of sentiment in which he had corresponded with Harkness over the past few months receded now. As Harkness stepped ashore, Young, it was reported a little later in the press, was in “the Netherland Indies” on a collecting trip, though he was in fact in Macao with his already pregnant wife, working for a Hong Kong bank.

  What could his relationship with Harkness possibly be now? Most likely the two adventurers didn't even know themselves. They probably had never had a frank conversation about it before parting, and wouldn't have broached it in the pages of their correspondence, since Harkness was always reluctant to write about anything sensitive in letters that could end up in the wrong hands.

  Neither one likely had a clear sense of what would happen between them when they next met. They might not even have known themselves what they wanted, though it's doubtful Harkness would have carried on an affair with a married man.

  Young, for whom the emotional stakes were much higher, dealt with it immaturely. He vacillated. He dodged. He disappeared.

  The newlywed had clearly led Harkness to believe that he would be ready for a second expedition with her. But when it came time to act, he simply didn't show. In fact, in his youthful confusion, he couldn't manage to send a note of explanation to the Palace, where he knew Harkness would be staying, or even to Reib, who could have passed along the information to her.

  Harkness was truly on her own, even dealing with this emotional twist by herself, unable to discuss it with anyone. The expedition itself, which she would have to handle solo, would clearly be a far bigger trial. She didn't hesitate. Nothing was going to stop her; after all, as she told the China Press, returning to China for a panda was a mission she held sacred.

  First, though, she had to wrangle with Floyd Tangier Smith. He wasn't actually in town at the moment, but distance did not dim the rivalry between them; if anything, it was glowing hotter. They were each quite intent on being the one to bring the next giant panda to the West.

  For a few weeks Smith had pulled well ahead. Months before, from the infusion of funds his sister had sent, he had jump-started his hunting operation. He reconnected with local trackers he had trained years before.

  In June, hunters, though they very well may not have been his own men, captured two giant pandas and sold them to Smith. Once in Smith's custody, the young male died of an infected foot while being transported out of western China. The young adult female, Jennie, who was being fed a diet of bread, rice, and fruit, made it all the way to Shanghai, where she boarded the Andre Lebon at the end of July. There were rumors that Smith had shaved the panda and dyed her fur in an effort to smuggle her out of the country as a brown bear. He would admit to shaving the animal, but only to keep her cool.

  Smith always said that Harkness had gone sneaking around Shanghai in an effort to smuggle Su-Lin out. Yet he behaved in exactly the same manner during the two weeks he spent in the city with his giant panda, keeping the animal at the far reaches of town, and only bringing her to the dock at “the last possible moment.” He sailed eventually with what the Shanghai Sunday Times described as “a mysterious box,” the contents having been a well-guarded “deep secret.” The poor panda wouldn't even make Singapore. She died in her wood-and-iron crate in the unbearable tropical heat. Harkness would hear of the sad news within about a week of her arrival in Shanghai.

  Pandaless, Smith continued on to England, where he chased after new sources of revenue, while crowing to the press that he planned the following year to branch out into unexplored areas of China, certain that he would find not just new species but whole new genuses.

  Even in his absence, his bitterness lingered in Shanghai. Almost as soon as she had stepped ashore, Harkness learned that Smith had “kept alive the story that I stole Su Lin from his hunters in the Press, and made a nasty mess of things,” she wrote home. “I would feel very badly about it, but anyone who has ever known Ajax of course does not believe him. There has been a constant bunch of publicity ever since I left.”

  Sowerby had amassed a small mountain of clippings on the subject, which he shared with her over tea at his house on her second day in town. Reading the details and grasping the extent of Smith's attack for the first time triggered a fresh fury. “Such slander and vituperation I have never seen before,” she wrote. “And Ajax paints himself as being so honorable in the Press; that I made arrangements that he should hunt Pandas while I stayed in civilization and we were to share the profits; that I have double crossed him in every way; never a mention that his hunters are still working upcountry on Bill's money, and that these Pandas he got were bought with money that should be mine.… It is all unbelievable.”

  She also read Sowerby's thoughts on the matter. He had repeatedly championed her cause, getting his licks in where Smith was concerned. An inveterate writer of letters to the editor, the old naturalist sent notes about the feud to the North China Daily News on July 26 and August 4. With a tone of calm authority, he said that by gathering “independent evidence offered by foreigners” who had been in western China, he found that Harkness's story held up. He pointed out that Smith's laying claim to any territory or hunters in western China was ludicrous. He also taunted Smith, as he would again and again, with the point that cut the deepest. “That Mrs. Harkness, a mere woman, succeeded where many men had failed was a feat greatly to her credit, but it must have been a rather bitter pill for some of the male hunters.”

  Smith, in England, wouldn't see the paper for months, but when he did, he would draft a furious letter, quoting those lines, as he responded to what he said was a personal attack. He was filled with “righteous indignation” over being portrayed as “a sneaking skunk.” He wanted to make obvious that “I have not failed, and that Mrs. Harkness has not yet succeeded.” As Smith saw it, he was trying to clear his own name, which Sowerby had “rather dragged in the mud.”

  He shouldn't have used the past tense, for Sowerby had just begun. In the July issue of The China Journal, he reported on Smith's pandas, burying the news low in a story that focused on Ruth Harkness's panda. Even though the writer-naturalist had already covered her victory extensively by that time, he again took another opportunity to call it “an epic in the annals of zoological exploration in China—and in the history of world exploration.” In the August issue, as he updated the news on Smith's pandas, he also mentioned Harkness's “first.” Long after Harkness had left Shanghai again, the campaign would continue. In September Sowerby would begin an item on pandas with a briefing on Harkness and Su-Lin, followed by a report on the death of both Smith's pandas.

  By October, the ed
itor would publicly dispute Smith's explanation of Jennie's death, dismissing the notion that she had died because of the tricky issue of feeding a panda anything but bamboo. He would point out that Su-Lin was thriving on a varied diet provided by the Brookfield Zoo. “We are [inclined] to disagree with Mr. Smith's diagnosis of the cause of death of his giant panda, suggesting, rather, that it was the excessive heat of the tropics which killed the animal.” Sowerby, who thought Smith a fool, didn't bother to conceal his disdain. “To attempt to transport such an animal through the tropics in the middle of summer seems to us to be courting disaster.… It is a very great pity that some other route, preferably that by way of Canada was not chosen, for the loss of so valuable and rare an animal is a great blow to science.” Adding a little salt on the wound, Sowerby would choose that issue to run three full pages of photos of Harkness and Su-Lin.

  As grateful as Harkness must have been for Sowerby's staunch defense, she naturally wanted to stand up for herself before the people of Shanghai. “The whole story told by Ajax is ridiculous,” she told reporter James Hammond. “It simply doesn't hold water.… Does he think that the whole West China belongs to him? It certainly does not.” She underscored the very salient fact that several other panda hunters had entered that same area without riling Smith.

  Harkness began her interview by answering Smith's charges, then quickly went on the offense. This was an all-out brawl. Unconcerned with appearing ladylike, she struck out at Smith, portraying the old boy as a touch artist who had pressured her for cash the previous summer, and who had surreptitiously socked away plenty of her dead husband's money before she had ever had a chance to inquire about it. In fact, she told the reporter, she suspected that it was Bill's money paying for the two pandas Smith had recently acquired.

  She disliked having to descend to “the level of Ajax” in the disagreement, she said, but felt forced to. Frankly, Harkness said, “I want to forget this whole sordid, vindictive business. I am as fed up with it as I imagine a good portion of the public is.” Putting it all behind her, however, would not be easy—both her ex-partners would remain in the picture for some time. Her fortunes would eerily continue to inversely mirror Smith's many times afterward. And she actually corresponded with Russell, though he never seemed to have told her what she was now hearing about him in Shanghai. It would appear, she wrote home, that the story about his tethering a perfectly tame young giant panda and blasting him were true. “Can you believe such a thing?” she wrote her friends. “The missionary boy who was with him told friends of mine. Two fine men, Ajax and Jerry [sic].”

  All of the personal problems Harkness faced, however, were about to fade into insignificance. On Friday morning, August 13, hearing the sounds of a skirmish across Soochow Creek, Harkness headed over to see what was going on. By the time she got to the site, the fighting had ended. She witnessed, instead, something even more astonishing. In torrents, through the awful summer heat, thousands of Chinese poured into the International Settlement seeking safety from what everyone feared was the coming battle. “Wide thoroughfares and bridges were literally jammed tight with suffering, sweating humanity as the exodus to the foreign-controlled areas continued during the day and well into the night,” the North China Herald reported. The frantic refugees carried everything they owned in wheelbarrows, carts, and on their backs, camping out wherever they could find space. Many could stake out just enough room for a simple straw mat on the Bund's foreshore, or in the alleys of the northern section.

  Everything in Shanghai started going haywire. All entrances to the Settlement save one were sealed. Train, bus, and boat traffic was disrupted or shut down. The big North Station train terminal became a Chinese fortress. Settlement authorities projected mobilization orders for members of the volunteer corps on the screens of movie houses across the city, and audiences applauded as the men rose from their seats.

  “A fine little war brewing,” Harkness wrote home ominously. Shanghailanders were buzzing with speculation.

  By Saturday morning, it seemed the wind had been knocked out of the city. In the still summer heat, fear simmered under a tight cover of cloud. In her hotel, Harkness received a call from Dan Reib. Relying on information from well-placed sources, he told her that under no circumstances was she to leave the safety of the hotel that day. Something big was about to happen.

  Sure enough, trouble came in spades. Over the next few hours, under Chiang Kai-shek's orders, Chinese biplanes itching to sink the Idzumo swooped in and out of clouds, drawing antiaircraft fire. After each raid, rings of smoke hovered in the air. “Half-thrilled, half-fearful” elite foreigners couldn't resist standing out on rooftops to watch the action, while below, on the crowded streets, falling shell fragments killed and injured several homeless Chinese who were unable to find cover.

  In the late afternoon all hell broke loose in what became the worst day in the history of the Settlement. Chinese planes battling it out with the Idzumo accidentally dropped two bombs on the Bund. One landed directly on Harkness's hotel, slamming down three floors; the other detonated just outside on Nanking Road, between the hotel and the Cathay.

  Scene of utter devastation outside the Palace Hotel on Nanking Road on “Bloody Saturday,” August 14, 1937. COURTESY talesofoldchina.com

  The explosions were deafening and deadly, shattering glass and smashing masonry. When the smoke lifted, “a scene of dreadful death was uncovered.” The pavement ran slick with blood. Severed limbs and heads lay among the shards of glass and rubble. In burned-out cars, charred occupants remained upright in their seats. The smell of blood and burning flesh mingled with the acrid bomb fumes. As the hundreds of dazed and dying came to, they writhed in pain on the debris-strewn street, filling the air with their sobs.

  Minutes later, another two bombs exploded nearby in the French Concession outside the Great World Amusement Center, where Chinese refugees were packed tight to receive a handout of rice and tea. The devastation here was even worse. In a flash, the corpses of these desperate people were piled high, the remnants of their once-precious boxes, bundles, and birdcages strewn all about them.

  “Death from little bombs rained from the heavens in the International Settlement and French Concession … to bring a screaming hell to hundreds of Chinese and foreign civilians such as has not been seen nor scarcely imagined in this city,” James Hammond wrote in The China Press. “All told,” according to historian Stella Dong, “it was the worst civilian carnage in a single day anywhere in the world up to that moment.” The tally for what was quickly dubbed “Bloody Saturday” was 1,740 dead, 1,431 injured.

  Friends and relatives across the Settlement were frantic to locate loved ones near the bomb scene. Harkness's gang must have been distraught—particularly Reib, whose orders had put her directly in harm's way. But Harkness was unhurt. In fact, she hadn't been anywhere near the hotel when the bombs fell. Ignoring Reib's dire instructions, she had gone off to have lunch in what was considered a more dangerous part of the city—the Japanese section. “I naturally disobeyed orders,” she would later write of her decision.

  Unscathed physically, she was not spared the horrible sight of the disaster. She had returned to the hotel minutes after the attack, finding a picture beyond imagination. “I hope never to see anything like it again,” she said.

  If Reib hadn't realized it before, by now he knew how little Harkness needed coddling. When friends from the States wrote to him, worried about her, he replied, “Do not worry about Ruth, as she is fully capable of looking out for herself and has very devoted friends scattered over the country that will assist her in every respect. Besides this, she is a most resourceful person, and as you well know fully capable of looking after herself, if need be.”

  That night, Shanghai, the flashy nocturnal city, went dark. A lightsout curfew was instituted, with most restaurants, cinemas, and clubs closing and locking their doors.

  The day, which had been rougher than anyone would have guessed, prompted an immediate race to
reach safety. While hundreds of thousands of Chinese continued to pour into the International Settlement, the foreigners began to flee from it. By Tuesday, the first wave of British women and children were evacuated to Hong Kong aboard the P&O Rajputana. On Wednesday hundreds more left, but by now no traffic along the river was believed safe. With heavy Japanese fire directed at Chinese planes overhead, British men-o'-war, instead of tugs, ferried the evacuees to the ship as a precaution. American women and children began their exodus aboard the SS President McKinley, bound for Manila. It carried away the heaviest load of passengers it had ever borne, with desperate refugees “stuffed into remaining nooks and crannies.” Thousands would be moved over the coming days. Harkness was not interested in joining the women being evacuated, though she did ride one of the tenders out to the McKinley to ensure that her mail bound for the States made it aboard.

  Ever more determined to follow through with her expedition, she stayed in Shanghai, where the smell of death still lingered. The “incessant bombing, shelling, and the horrible chatter of machine guns and anti aircraft” did, she had to admit, “get under my skin a bit.” And, yes, Shanghai was “a pretty nerve wracking place to be in,” particularly because she found she had a knack for being out in the open along the Bund during big raids, but the words of a psychic in New York had bolstered her already strong conviction that she would be safe. “I know that this War will not be my finish. So with perfect confidence I can go to the Bund during the heaviest bombardment and know that it is not for me. A rather cozy feeling, although one does feel sorry for the other poor devils.”