The Way of the Panda – Always Cute, Always Political

Henry Nicholls’s  The Way of the Panda: The Curious History of China’s Political Animal is a fascinating read. Pandas these days of course are political tools more than just cuddly and rather dumb beasts.  The political uses the PRC has put pandas to rather sticks in the throat but then as this book shows Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT started the whole Panda Diplomacy nonsense during WW2 sending Pan-Dee and Pan-Dah (geddit) to the Bronx Zoo. There’s a fair amount in this book that retreads the issues around the early panda hunts and the life of the great panda hunter Ruth Harkness – stuff covered a few years back in Vicki Constantine Croke’s The Lady and the Panda. Still this is well worth a read. As ever blurb and image below.

Henry Nicholls is a freelance science journalist writing regularly for Nature, New Scientist and BBC Focus as well as the broadsheets. His first book Lonesome George told the story of the last giant tortoise of Pinta in the Galapagos and was shortlisted for the 2007 Royal Society General Book Prize.