Move over Wayne and Coleen. Forget Nicola and Brooklyn. The internet is about to welcome the world’s newest celebrity power couple—and, quite possibly, its most adorable.
Meet Ping Ping and Fu Shuang, two giant pandas being sent on diplomatic loan to a zoo in Atlanta, Georgia, as a gift from Chinese President Xi Jinping.
The rare animals arrived in the United States earlier this week, a carefully timed gesture of friendship following Xi’s visit to the White House.
Atlanta was chosen for a reason. In 2024, when relations between China and the United States had reached a frosty low under President Joe Biden, the final three pandas in America were recalled from that very zoo and sent back to China.
As a symbol of diplomatic hostility, the move could hardly have been more pointed.
Donald Trump may now claim credit for repairing the relationship. Even so, he is unlikely to be as delighted as the first US president to benefit from China’s so-called panda diplomacy.
In 1972, First Lady Pat Nixon and her husband, President Richard Nixon, travelled to Beijing for dinner—and returned home with two black-and-white ambassadors of their own.
Pat Nixon was captivated by pandas. On the first evening of the Nixons’ historic China visit, she told Chinese leader Zhou Enlai exactly how much she admired them.
Two giant pandas have arrived in Atlanta from China following Chinese leader Xi Jinping’s White House meeting with US President Donald Trump
The ‘FedEx Panda Express’ Boeing 777 aircraft is seen arriving at Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport in Atlanta on September 27
Zhou responded by giving the United States Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing—pronounced Shing-Shing—whose names translate as Darling Girl and Twinkling Star.
In return, the US presented Beijing Zoo with two musk oxen, Milton and Matilda. They were impressive animals, but lacked quite the same star appeal.
Pat Nixon was so thrilled by the pandas that she attended their arrival at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Washington. She watched happily as they nibbled honeybread toast before declaring: ‘Comic little things! I think panda-monium is going to break out right here at the zoo.’
The wave of excitement surrounding the animals in America did not escape notice in China.
The Communist government, which had previously shown little interest in its daxiongmao, or ‘giant cat bears’, began to recognise that the pandas offered an extraordinary and valuable diplomatic resource.
The appeal was simple: the West adored giant pandas, while China controlled the world’s supply.
At first, Zhou Enlai’s government embraced the opportunity. Britain, Spain, West Germany, Japan, Mexico and France were all courted with panda gifts. But within a decade, Chinese officials concluded that they were giving away too much of their valuable diplomatic capital.
Pandas were no longer presented as gifts. Instead, they became a form of high-interest credit, with zoos now paying as much as $1 million—around £750,000—a year for the privilege of caring for one.
First Lady Pat Nixon is seen at a ceremony at the National Zoo in Washington, DC, in 1972 visiting Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing, the giant pandas gifted to the United States by China
Wearing a panda pin on her lapel, she declared that ‘panda-monium’ had broken out at the zoo
The first example of panda diplomacy was a direct result of First Lady Pat Nixon’s encounter with Giant Pandas at the Peking Zoo (she is seen admiring a panda at The National Zoo)
If they establish a successful breeding programme, which almost never happens, the babies are automatically Chinese property. And if a panda dies and the zoo is held responsible, fines of up to $500,000 are due.
But when the West first went panda-mad, a century ago, attitudes in both China and the US were much less sentimental… and interest in conservation was non-existent.
The animals were unknown to Americans and Europeans until the Catholic missionary Pere Armand David saw a panda skin on display in a house in 1869. He paid for one to be captured and killed, and sent its corpse to Paris to be examined by scientists.
An expedition to China in the early 20th century managed to capture a wild baby panda, but the explorers had no idea how to feed it and it died within days.
In 1929, two hunters – Ted Roosevelt and his brother Kermit, the sons of former President Teddy Roosevelt – set out with a different aim: to be the first Westerners to kill an adult giant panda. The brothers, both in their mid-30s, were obsessive hunters.
The historian Nathalia Holt, whose bestseller The Beast in the Clouds told their story last year, notes that in a previous expedition to central Asia in 1925, the Roosevelt boys killed more than 2,000 animals.
They braved the bandit country of Sichuan province in south-west China, where feuding warlords sometimes laid waste to entire villages.
In places, Ted wrote in their joint memoir, Trailing The Giant Panda, ‘the scene was as desolate as the devastated area in France’ where he had fought in the trenches.
The pandas boarded the chartered flight at 2am, kicking off their 10-year stay in the US
A farewell ceremony is held for giant pandas Ping Ping and Fu Shuang at Chengdu Research Base of Giant Panda Breeding before they boarded their flight to Atlanta
After months of trekking, they reached the Yehli region where local hunters agreed to help them find their quarry. Setting out the next morning, they walked along snowy tracks for two-and-a-half hours until they found a clearing with distinctive green droppings that contained semi-digested bamboo.
When a panda peered at them from a thicket, the brothers took aim and fired together. Neither managed to kill it with their first or second shots, and it dragged itself 75 yards into the brush before they were able to find it and finish it off.
The Roosevelts’ tradition was to take their kills back to their camp and share the meat with locals. The villagers, though, were horrified at what these Westerners had done. The panda was a sacred animal to them. They refused to touch its body.
Back in the US, the Roosevelts were celebrated as heroes and gave lectures to packed halls. In Chicago, 1,500 people without tickets were turned away. It was partly this hullabaloo that inspired the socialite Ruth Harkness and her playboy husband William to make their own panda hunting expedition to China five years later.
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Their ambition was different, though. They aimed to bring back the first live giant panda to America. The adventure began in tragedy. After 18 months of preparation and travelling, William died when they reached Shanghai, from throat cancer. Ruth, who was 35, decided to press on and finish the mission alone.
She was guided into the dangerous mountain regions by a 22-year-old Chinese American, Quentin Young. Photographs of the pair reveal a dazzle of glamour about them. Ruth had been a fashion designer, and she wore her silks and furs like the widowed heiress she was.
Socialite Ruth Harkness (pictured with baby pander Su-Lin) and her playboy husband William made their own panda hunting expedition to China. However, tragedy struck when after 18 months of preparation, William died from throat cancer when they reached Shanghai
Ruth was guided into the dangerous mountain regions by a 22-year-old Chinese American, Quentin Young. He was fascinated by Ruth and the pair became lovers
Quentin was extraordinarily good-looking, with high cheekbones, an enigmatic smile and slicked black hair, like a silent movie star. He was fascinated by Ruth, and they became lovers.
On September 26, 1936, they sailed from Shanghai on a steamer up the Yangtze river to Chengdu. There, they hired a team of 16 dozen luggage bearers who struggled into the hills carrying a mass of equipment on their backs, including a wooden cage.
‘I don’t know whether it will be humanly possible to get a panda or not,’ Ruth wrote to a friend, Perkie, back in the States, ‘but I feel that if it is, I will. After all, my dear, there probably aren’t more than three white people who have ever seen one and no one knows his habits or what he eats, or anything about it. I hope that I can get a baby one… I have nursing bottles, [rubber] nipples and Dryco milk for him.’
On a morning in November, just below the snow line, the trackers found a mother with its baby. They killed the adult and Quentin brought the infant back to Ruth, tucking it inside his shirt to keep it warm.
The party trekked back to Shanghai, carrying the tiny panda on furs in a basket. Ruth, who had no children, fed it every few hours on powdered milk. ‘I’m sorry I don’t know more about babies… at times, I think [it] is the only thing that I have not experienced,’ she wrote.
She called the panda Su Lin, after Quentin’s sister. The name meant, she said, ‘a little bit of something very cute’.
At the docks, customs officials refused to allow Ruth to take the panda out of the country. She slept with it in the warehouse, feeding it through the night, until an ‘arrangement’ was reached with the officers. The panda was listed on paperwork as a dog, and they were allowed to sail for America.
Su Lin lived with Ruth for several months in her New York apartment, before moving to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Ruth returned to China, where she captured another panda, which she called Mei Mei, as a companion for Su Lin.
Baby panda Su-Lin lived with Ruth for several months in her New York apartment, before moving to Chicago’s Brookfield Zoo. Ruth returned to China, where she captured another panda, which she called Mei Mei, as a companion for Su Lin
By now, every zoo wanted a panda. A Japanese-born banker from the US called Floyd Tangier-Smith purchased six animals from poachers in Chengdu and, loading them in crates onto the back of trucks, drove them for 35 days to Hong Kong.
One of the pandas was dead before they could board a cargo ship. The others survived the journey to London, arriving in a blizzard on Christmas Eve, 1938. The oldest, nicknamed Grandma, contracted pneumonia and died.
Tangier-Smith named the survivors Happy, Dopey, Grumpy and Baby. The first went to a German dealer, while the others were sold to London Zoo for £800 each (£47,000 today) – where, in an early bout of political correctness, they were renamed Tang, Sung and Ming.
Ming, the youngest, became a sensation. She started a craze for panda soft toys, her picture appeared on Tube posters, and the King’s daughters, Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret, were photographed stroking her at the zoo. Ruth Harkness visited, too.
The Daily Mail’s ‘zoo correspondent’ reported: ‘Ming, the baby giant panda, is London’s ‘Glamour Girl No 1′ these days. There is not a star in Hollywood who has hit the headlines so forcibly or so often in six short weeks.’
Ticket sales soared as thousands queued to see her, and the zoo reckoned to have recouped its outlay even before the other two pandas went on display in April.
In 1958, the zoo acquired another panda, Chi Chi, from an Austrian animal dealer – who had obtained her in a swap for a number of African big game animals. Keepers had high hopes that Chi Chi would mate with another panda imported from Moscow, and have the first baby panda born in captivity.
The animals were treated to the best Cornish bamboo, with added chicken, chocolate and porridge. Despite this, they failed to show the slightest interest in each other.
A year passed before vets discovered the reason. Chi Chi was male. The first clue, the Mail reported, came when 15st Chi Chi began ‘knocking the stuffing out of large rubber tyres and playballs like an all-in wrestler in training’.
A thirteen-year-old Princess Elizabeth and her sister Princess Margaret Rose are seen admiring a giant panda during an early morning visit to the London Zoo in 1939
A zoo official admitted: ‘It really is terribly difficult to tell whether pandas are male or female. I suppose they know themselves, but the differences are very slight and no one knows anything about their sex lives.’
Pandas in captivity are notoriously reluctant to mate. In 2013, keepers at China’s breeding and research centre in Chengdu resorted to ‘panda porn’ in an effort to make five-year-old Ke Lin more receptive to her companion, a male called Yong Yong.
‘Every time Yong Yong tried to mount her,’ a PR spokesman said, ‘Ke Lin fought him off. We were worried she was going to miss her three-day breeding cycle. So we showed them a film of pandas mating in the wild, and she took great interest in it. After that there was no stopping her, and they mated successfully.’
Edinburgh Zoo was less successful with its panda couple, Sunshine and Sweetie (or, in Chinese, Tian Tian and Yang Guang). In a forlorn attempt to help the animals get into a romantic mood, vets banned anything that might disturb them – including leaf-blowers and bright colours such as high-viz jackets. It didn’t work.
The pair were returned to China in 2023, and since then there have been no giant pandas in Britain. No zoo here has ever successfully bred one.
But one baby panda has proved a global superstar, even more popular than Ming or Su Lin. Her name is Mei Xiang (pronounced May Shong) and she was introduced to the world in an 18-second YouTube clip, 20 years ago, in autumn 2006.
For the first few seconds of the video, nothing much happens. A female giant panda is propped up in the corner of her pen on a raffia mat, munching a cracker, with her cub sleeping at her feet.
Without warning, the baby gives a convulsive sneeze. The noise is shattering, a squawk erupting from nowhere, as if a parrot has exploded just out of shot.
Mama Panda jumps out of her skin. It’s such a human reaction, sheer alarm and then bewilderment before she shrugs and goes back to her cracker, that you can’t help laughing, however many times you watch it.
And it has been watched a mind-boggling number of times. The original clip was viewed by 100million people before being deleted in a copyright dispute. It was then reposted and has been seen a further quarter of a billion times.
It’s been called ‘the sneeze that broke the internet’ and, arguably, it started the craze for viral online video shorts now so popular on TikTok.
Pat Nixon was right when she predicted panda-monium.