Traveling to History: Nine, Part 1
TRAINS, BOATS, AND PLANES: JOHN TEE-VAN’S 36,000-MILE ODYSSEY TO BRING PANDAS TO NEW YORK CITY
By James F. Lee
John Tee-Van and Dr. David Graham observe a panda in China. Graham, curator of the West China Union Museum, led the expedition that captured the female panda given as a gift to the people of the United States by the government of China. (©Wildlife Conservation Society. Reproduced by permission of the WCS Archives)
Part 1 – Getting to China
On Sunday, May 11, 1941, a Bronx Zoo station wagon under police escort rushed to Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center (now Columbia University Irving Medical Center) conveying a most unusual and very ill patient: Pandora, the resident giant panda at the zoo. She had been in deteriorating health and suffering convulsions. At the hospital, doctors took several x-rays of the panda’s brain before sending her back to the zoo, where she died two days later.
Pandora had been a sensation at the Bronx Zoo. Hundreds of thousands of visitors came to see her during her three-year residence at the zoo, and she was a star attraction at the 1939 World’s Fair, drawing over 200,000 sightseers. New Yorkers took her death hard.
And for one New Yorker in particular her death had a profound effect: in the latter months of 1941, zoologist John Tee-Van would find himself on a 36,000-mile odyssey to remote southwestern China to bring home Pandora’s replacement.
During the 1930’s, zoos throughout the Western world clamored for pandas because they were such crowd-pleasers. Adventurers, missionaries, explorers, and hunters scoured southwestern China and the Tibetan Plateau for pandas to capture and sell to North American and European zoos.
Allyn R. Jennings, general director of the New York Zoological Society (Bronx Zoo), knowing that Henry Luce and Clare Boothe Luce were in China visiting Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, fired off a cable asking for their help in securing a new panda. Soong Mei-ling, Chiang’s wife, dispatched Professor David Graham to lead a crew of 287 Chinese workers on a panda-hunting expedition. Graham was a respected missionary, zoological collector, and anthropologist living in China.
Capturing a bear alive was a difficult and expensive undertaking, but Soong offered the panda as a gift to the people of the United States from the government of China, reestablishing the venerable Chinese practice of panda diplomacy.
But the offer was strictly pick up: once a panda was procured, it was up to the zoo to transport it to New York.
Tee-Van was a logical choice for this journey. He had a life-long association with the Bronx Zoo, beginning as an apprentice keeper in the bird department at age 14. For many years he worked with famed ecologist William Beebe in the zoo’s Department of Tropical Research, accompanying him on scientific expeditions around the world. In 1941, at age 44, he was a well-respected zoologist, young enough and experienced enough to endure the arduous journey to China.
A Boeing 314 Pan American Clipper like the one John Tee-Van flew from San Francisco to Auckland. (Library of Congress photo {{PD US}}).
The fastest way for Tee-Van to get to China in 1941 was by air. Tee-Van planned to fly the southern route via New Zealand, Australia, and Burma, stopping along the way to arrange for the panda’s food and shelter for the long trip back. His journey was a race against the clock considering the alarming situation in Asia in late 1941: war was raging in China where Nationalist and Communist Chinese forces were fighting a Japanese invasion, and conflict threatened to break out in Burma and The Philippines. China was a dangerous destination.
He left La Guardia by air on September 24 taking the TWA flight to St. Louis. From that day on, he would keep a daily journal keenly detailing his observations and activities during his odyssey. During his first stop in St. Louis, for example, he visited the St. Louis Zoo, observing the three pandas in residence there and discussing the panda diet with the zookeepers.
Flying next to San Francisco, he passed several busy days visiting the zoo, Steinhart Aquarium, the Botanical Gardens, and planning for his upcoming flights. One night he went to a movie theater and saw Arthur Menken’s newsreel “The Bombing of Chung King” (Chongqing). He later received a phone call saying that a panda had arrived at Chengdu.
On October 2, Tee-Van boarded Pan American Airways’ Anzac Clipper for the 8,000-mile flight to Auckland. This was one of Pan Am’s newest routes, inaugurated only a month before, with stops at Honolulu, Canton (now Kanton) Island, Fiji, and Noumea, New Caledonia. He flew aboard a Boeing 314A, a four-engine aircraft easily identifiable by its iconic triple tail. It had a flying range or 5,200 miles and could carry 74 passengers and 10 crew.
Pan American Clippers were majestic seaplanes, or flying boats. A Clipper’s water landing or takeoff was a magnificent sight. Vintage videos show the spray cascading against the sides as the plane touches down while the four huge propellers spin. They captured the American public’s attention and were a means of romanticizing Asia and the Pacific.
Pan American Airways’ Pacific routes in 1941. Tee-Van journeyed on the southern route to Auckland. Map by R.E.G. Davis. (With permission of Pan Am Historical Foundation).
Pan Am blazed many routes across the Pacific connecting San Francisco with Honolulu, China, Hong Kong, Manila, and other locations, hopscotching across the Pacific, stopping at remote refueling stations along the way. The planes were named after their route destination: China Clipper, Hong Kong Clipper, Philippine Clipper, etc. Fares were expensive, first-class only. The fare from San Francisco to Auckland, for example, was $301 one way, $541.80, round-trip (approximately $5,000 and $9,500, respectively in 2021 dollars).
At the stop in Honolulu, Tee-Van consulted with botanists about the kinds of bamboo available in Hawaii that he might utilize on his return flight for the panda. The departure from Honolulu was very rough; Tee-Van called it “an exceedingly bumpy ride;” forcing a return to Honolulu. A curious incident happened during Tee-Van’s extra day in Hawaii. He was invited to speak at a luncheon for the Pan-Pacific Union. Because the Japanese Consul-General was in attendance, Tee-Van kept mum about his visit to China.
Reaching Auckland on October 11, Tee-Van consulted with Pan Am’s Traffic Manager Phil Delaney about his return flight from China. Tee-Van planned to collect other animal specimens in Australia and New Zealand, such as a duck-billed platypus, koala bears, kiwi birds, tuatara lizards, and others. The Zoological Society enlisted the aid of the Prime Minister of New Zealand and the Australian ambassador to the United States for permission to extract these protected species for Tee-Van to take home to the zoo. Delaney would work out a plan to convert space on the Clipper in the cargo hold to house this menagerie.
An Anzac Clipper, Boeing 314, at Noumea in 1941. Photo taken about the time that Tee-Van stopped over there. (PD-Australia via Wikimedia Commons)
While in Auckland, Tee-Van received a telegram saying that the panda awaiting him in Chengdu was a five-month-old female. He also noted that Auckland was under night-time blackout, an ominous sign of looming war in the Pacific.
Tee-Van left Auckland for Sydney on October 12 aboard a small flying boat. There was much to do at Sydney: arranging for passage of the panda during the return trip, locating sources of bamboo, and visiting the zoo and aquarium. At the Botanical Gardens he secured a supply of Eucalyptus seeds for the panda’s diet.
Continuing westward aboard the flying boat Caledonia, stopping at Brisbane, Townsville, and Darwin, Tee-Van planned at all his layovers for the panda’s food and quartering for the return circuit.
Tee-Van observed the world around him in fine detail. Flying over Java, he described “… indented rocky coastlands, with green stains of reefs reaching underwater to the depths where green became merged with the dark green of the sea.” Two native men rowing a boat were “…clad in worn dark blue coats with red and white bands on the cuffs. Rowed with very short strokes of narrow-bladed oars, in a heavy blunt bowed rowboat.”
Shwedagon Pagoda (The Golden Pagoda) visited by Tee-Van while he was in Rangoon. Photo by Rowe & Co., about 1900. {{PD-US}}.
By October 20, he reached Singapore for a short layover, and then flew to Rangoon by flying boat the next day, where he stayed at the famous Strand Hotel, visited the zoo, saw the Golden Pagoda, and arranged for his return flights to Auckland.
Tee-Van was astounded by the color of Rangoon, devoting a section of his journal to “Rangoon Streets.” “Costumes with completely unchecked liberality of variance, trousers, skirt-like wrapping about, draped leg. Blue upper garments with draped pink legs. … Turbans. Bicycles, taxis. Sack coat of dark blue on alert young man with skirt of bright apple green … messengers with oblique red shoulder straps and enormous polished brass badges, six to eight inches in diameter, oval. Cheroots smoked … Yellow-robed Burmese priests.”
Tee-Van departed Rangoon for the flight to Lashio aboard a Douglas 21 passenger plane painted in brown and green camouflage. He noted on the flight two British aircraft maneuvering in the sky with six pursuit planes trailing close behind. These maneuvers were just another indication of impending war.
At Lashio in northern Burma, Tee-van arranged for his flight to Chungking (Chongqing). He changed planes at Kunming, China where he learned the unsettling fact that pilots pray for cloudy weather when approaching that city. In clear weather, the city was subject to Japanese bombing. He was now entering a war zone.
He changed planes without incident leaving Kunming on a DC-3, landing at Chongqing on October 24.
After a month-long trek, he was finally in China, anxious to meet his new charge, a young panda. He also was to learn that his planned return route would change considerably.
Read about Tee-Van’s journey home in Part 2 in the next blog post
Sources:
“Journey to China for Giant Pandas,” daily journal by John Tee-Van, 1941. WCS Archives.
Pan American Clippers: The Golden Age of Flying Boats. James Trautman, Boston Mill Press, 2007.
The Lady and the Panda. Vicki Constantine Croke. Random House, 2005.
“Giant Panda at the Bronx Zoo Gravely Ill; Goes to Medical Center for X-Ray of Brain.” New York Times, May 12, 1941, p. 19. Accessed via TimesMachine, 12/14/2020.
