Lovable cub Pandora recalled 78 years later

Visitor fondly tells story of the cuddly arrival that made childhood days so memorable

Marion Walker was all smiles when she saw a small panda at the Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding in Sichuan province on Nov 8.

The 86-year-old Canadian said the young panda reminded her of Pandora, the cub with whom she and her elder sister, Enid Walker, played frequently in 1938. At that time, the Walker family lived at West China Union University in Chengdu.

Pandora was "very cute" and, like the pandas at the base now, liked climbing, Walker recalls.

This was Walker's fourth visit to the city since childhood. After an absence of 70 years, she returned to Changdu, her birthplace, for the first time in 2008.

She and 16 other Canadians came at the invitation of Sichuan University's School of Public Health to attend the opening ceremony on Nov 9 of a museum about the "CS Kids", as Walker and her fellow former students of the Canadian School are known.

The museum also tells the story of Pandora, according to Shen Zaiwang, a senior official in the Sichuan Provincial Association for Friendship With Foreign Countries.

More than 100 years ago, a group of Canadian missionaries came to Sichuan, establishing West China's first Western clinic, along with West China Union University, which featured a strong dentistry department.

Their children were born and brought up in Sichuan.

Some of the CS Kids frolicked with Pandora after the cub was captured in the mountains of Guanxian city (now Dujiangyan) and was kept temporarily at the university before heading to the United States in May 1938.

The university had received a request from the New York Zoological Society, which wanted a baby panda or a pair, if possible. With the help of the hunters, the wife of biology professor Frank Dickinson, took the cub to her home at the university. She kept it as a pet and named it Pandora.

Until Dickinson's colleague Roy Spooner, a chemistry professor, took Pandora to the United States, many of the CS Kids played with it after school.

"When it was sunny, we would take Pandora to the lawn," says Beth Leach, one of CS Kids born in Chengdu. "Local residents flocked to see it, and it became a fad for locals to see Pandora."

Spooner flew with the cub from Chengdu to Chongqing, where they boarded a ship to Hong Kong via Shanghai, and then changed to a ship bound for the US.

Pandora died on May 13, 1941.

huangzhiling@chinadaily.com.cn

(China Daily European Weekly 11/11/2016 page15)