Ruth Harkness
American fashion designer (1900–1947)
Ruth Elizabeth Harkness (21 September 1900 – 20 July 1947) was an American fashion designer and socialite who traveled to China in 1936 and brought the first live giant panda to the United States.
Harkness was born in Titusville, Pennsylvania, a daughter of Robert and Mary Ann (née Patterson) McCombs. In 1934, her husband Bill Harkness had travelled to China in search of a panda, but died of throat cancer in Shanghai early in 1936. His widow Ruth, then living in New York City, decided to complete the mission herself.
Harkness traveled to Shanghai, and with the help of a Chinese-American explorer named Quentin Young, and Gerald Russell, a British naturalist, launched her own panda mission. After passing through Chongqing and Chengdu, the team arrived at a mountainous region, where, on 9 November 1936, they found and captured a nine-week-old panda cub. The panda, who they named Su Lin after Young's sister-in-law, was bottle-fed baby formula on the journey back to Shanghai and the United States. Su Lin meant the phrase 'a little bit of something very cute'. Young migrated to the United States in later years and felt he never got credit for his work in finding the panda.
The panda caused a great sensation in the American press and eventually ended up at the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago.
The public source identifies “Ruth Harkness” as american fashion designer (1900–1947). This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Ruth, Harkness and American.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Dec 16, 2025. The linked authority identifier is Q3306559. VIAF identifies the subject as 20825779. The Library of Congress control number is n2001019781. 3 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1900, 1947, 1936 and 1934.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ruth Harkness” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.