On a sunny day last October, Bao Li and Qing Bao arrived at the National Zoo in Washington. A 19-hour trans-Pacific flight aboard a FedEx cargo jet had ferried the 3-year-old pandas from their home in Sichuan, China, to U.S. soil, where they will spend the next decade of their lives.
The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda, Nathalia Holt, Atria/One Signal Publishers, 288 pp., $29.99, July 2025
The arrival of the two young bears merited a collective sigh of relief. After its three previous pandas were recalled to China in November 2023, the U.S. zoo had been without the bears for the first time in more than 20 years. A fraught relationship between the United States and China over trade, technology, and geopolitics made striking any new panda deal with the Asian superpower seem unlikely. The newcomers marked an unexpected diplomatic breakthrough.
Pandas have been China’s friendship token of choice since the 1940s, when the country gifted the United States a pair of cubs as a symbol of thanks for U.S. support in its efforts against Japan. Two more panda envoys followed U.S. President Richard Nixon’s historic 1972 Beijing visit, which normalized China-U.S. relations. Since then, China—the only nation with a wild panda population—has dispatched more than 60 pandas on loan to countries around the world, from Qatar to Russia.
How these bumbling bears came to play a persuasive role in diplomatic dealings rests on a formidable quest made by two U.S. explorers nearly a century ago. As journalist Nathalia Holt details in her new book, The Beast in the Clouds: The Roosevelt Brothers’ Deadly Quest to Find the Mythical Giant Panda, a perilous but largely forgotten expedition through southern China would kick off a global panda craze, confirming the existence of an animal once believed to belong only to myth.
Visitors photograph giant panda Bao Li in its enclosure at the National Zoo in Washington on Jan. 24.Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images
In December 1928, Ted and Kermit, two of former U.S. President Theodore Roosevelt’s six children, traveled to China on an expedition sponsored by Chicago’s Field Museum of Natural History. Their goal was to bring back the pelt of a black-and-white bear so rare that it would yield instant fame. At that point, “every large mammal on earth had been attained, and their bodies mounted in exhibits, except for one,” Holt writes. So little was known about the panda that the Roosevelts were not sure where, precisely, to start. No one knew where the bear lived, what it ate, or how it behaved.
This would explain why the brothers, seeking to escape from under their father’s shadow and bonding over a shared love of big game hunting, spent so much time traversing the Himalayas, chasing ghosts and rumors. At the time, scientists had no reason to think that the bear—if it was indeed that—should not inhabit a land of snow and ice. After all, they reasoned, the panda shared half of its fur in common with the polar bear. Hunters and researchers also expected it to be extraordinarily aggressive. The bicolored bear, Holt writes, “offered the ultimate challenge: a large mammal so elusive that no one had documented one, as deadly as a polar bear and as threatening as a black bear, occupying a habitat that no one could predict.”
Drawing on letters, expedition journals, interviews, and the Roosevelts’ own book, Trailing the Giant Panda, Holt places the brothers’ journey in a broader historical and political context that considers evolving views of conservation and hunting, the precipitous decline of the world’s biodiversity over the past century, and the emergence of panda diplomacy.
Britain’s Princess Margaret Rose and Princess Elizabeth meet a panda in 1939..Hulton Archive/via Getty Images
Yet her narrative does not wander far from the trail itself, closely tracking the Roosevelts’ plodding march from mountain towns plagued by opium addiction, through semi-autonomous Tibetan kingdoms, and finally to a heart-wrenching crescendo in China’s bamboo forests.
The brothers’ arduous journey was made much less so by the local guides who “had to hike far ahead of the men, pounding down snow with their fists” to help make a trail. Other recent works on mountain exploration have attempted to give porters their due, such as Headstrap: Legends and Lore from the Climbing Sherpas of Darjeeling, and Holt emphasizes the guides’ back-breaking labor, as well as the work done by the Roosevelts’ Chinese interpreter, Jack Young, who would go on to become an explorer in his own right.
Still, the privileged duo suffered through altitude sickness and freezing temperatures. They also grappled with dangerous bandits, deserting mules, and the mounting anxieties of failing to turn up a single panda during their struggles in the Himalayas. It would take the brothers nearly six months to find their black-and-white bounty in the country’s bamboo forests, underscoring that the panda was every bit as rare a century ago as it is today, with fewer than 2,000 now thought to remain in the wilds of southwestern China. The brothers “constantly stopped and chatted with men and women in the villages and on the trail,” Holt writes. “Every look was quizzical. No one had ever seen an animal like that before.”
The panda evades both the brothers and readers in Holt’s text, which prioritizes the action and adventure of the expedition. Few words are spared on the bear’s plight until three-quarters into the book, when the brothers finally encounter their prize, pulling the trigger on what is now one of the world’s most beloved creatures.
Hunting pandas is unimaginable by today’s standards. It was also unpalatable at the time, Holt reveals, as the Yi ethnic people encountered by the Roosevelt brothers refused to kill the bears—even when they rummaged through their apiaries. The Yi considered the panda a “supernatural being, a sort of demi-god,” according to a guide’s translation, and noted it was “not to be feared.” This view is shared by a number of Indigenous cultures that see bears, generally, as magical creatures, shapeshifters, or deities, such as the Quechua culture of the Peruvian Andes, which holds the ukuku—a half-human, half-bear figure—as a demi-god, or the Japanese Ainu, who worship the bear as the head of the gods.
Theodore Roosevelt Jr. and his guide Mohkta, photographed after the capture of a giant panda in China.Russell W. Hendee/via Field Museum of Natural History
The brothers soon realized their mistake, admitting that the sleepy, ambling bear they had filled with bullets was not aggressive, but “a gentleman,” as Kermit would write in his field journal. “The dark reality of what their accomplishment would mean was a phantom darting in front of them, obscuring their vision, and as dangerous as a beast in the clouds,” Holt writes. “They knew immediately, from the moment the panda fell, that they never wanted to hurt another of its kind.”
China would ban all panda hunting in 1938, the first such protections offered to a trophy game animal. (Kermit himself lobbied Chinese diplomats to prohibit hunting in 1936.) Later, killing a panda could be enough to warrant the death penalty. In my own reporting, I found that in 1993, two men were handed death sentences in a South China court for trafficking three panda pelts. Under China’s current penal code, killing a panda warrants a lighter punishment—“not less than 10 years.”
Regardless, the Roosevelts’ hunt had wrought a new future. In the wake of their successful return, more Westerners launched expeditions to China in hopes of capturing the elusive bear. Other writers, most notably Vicki Constantine Croke in The Lady and the Panda, have colorfully chronicled the efforts by New York socialite Ruth Harkness to bring the first live panda cub back to the United States in 1936. In turn, China also cracked down on the capture and export of its living pandas, cementing its monopoly of the bears.
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Taxidermists work on a giant panda display in a museum. - Taxidermists work on the installation of the giant panda display at the Field Museum of Natural History in 1931.
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A young girl sits on floor in front of the pandas display, writing in a notebook, in this historic photograph. - A girl sits in front of the giant panda display. Charles H. Carpenter/via Field Museum of Natural History
Although Holt’s conclusion largely focuses on the complicated outcomes for the Roosevelt brothers, her vivid prose and knack for depicting the adrenaline of the journey bring to life a remarkable chapter of history that would go on to redefine the human relationship with the animal kingdom. If not for the brothers’ expedition, China may never have realized what a powerful bargaining chip and soft-power tool it had at its disposal.
Some scholars say that the world is now in a renewed flurry of panda diplomacy. There are around 20 loan agreements active across the world, according to Barbara K. Bodine, the director of Georgetown University’s Institute for Study of Diplomacy, and countries covet pandas not just for the animals themselves, but for what they represent—good standing with China at a time when geopolitical alliances are fraught and uncertain.
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Environmentalists would argue that the panda—a living animal—should not be exploited for political gain. But the animal’s popularity means that China now spends hundreds of millions of dollars on panda conservation and has created a protected area three times the size Yellowstone National Park to safeguard their survival. Would any of that have been possible if not for the Roosevelts’ intrepid expedition? At the same time, China has put substantial resources into its captive panda breeding programs to guarantee a steady supply of soft power.
Holt’s book only briefly tangles with the thorny issues of modern conservation, leaving readers to consider the lasting implications of the brothers’ quest. But in unearthing the origin story of the international panda frenzy, Holt reveals how the United States helped to create a truly political animal.
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