When it comes to pandas, China is spot on

Whether they are black with white spots or white with black spots may be debated, but not the country's success

The giant panda has been on the earth for around 8 million years. But the West only learned about it in 1869 thanks to a French missionary trying to convert Chinese people to Roman Catholicism.

Jean Pierre Armand David (1826-1900) was born in Espelette, near Bayonne in the French Pyrenees. A Vincentian priest and a naturalist with extensive knowledge in ornithology, zoology and botany, he started working in the Dengchigou Catholic Church in Baoxing, a mountainous county under Ya'an city in Southwest China's Sichuan province in March 1869.

Soon afterward, he was invited to tea at a local hunter's home. That's where he first saw the skin of a giant panda. Suspecting it to be a new animal species, he had the hunter capture a live panda, made a specimen and mailed it to Musee d'Histoire Naturelle's Henri Milne Edwards in Paris. In 1870, Edwards published a paper declaring the panda to be a new species.