Cecile Adair’s Peter and the Pandas, 1943

Posted: March 4th, 2022 | No Comments »

If you’ve listened to my recent BBC Radio 3 documentary A Chinese Odyssey: Artists, Poets and Exiles in Interwar London (and if not, it’s here) you’ll know that the London-resident Chinese artist, poet and author Chiang Yee published several childrens book featuring pandas, inspired by the 1938 arrival of the first giant pandas at London Zoo.

But he wasn’t alone in cashing on the panda craze that swept Britain in the late 1930s and during WW2. Here is Cecile Adair’s Peter and the Pandas published by George Harrap in 1943…

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