155 A.D.
Repeated attempts to make pandas fight in the colosseum end in failure.

695 A.D.
Japanese Empress Jitō asks Chinese Empress Wu Zetian to send a panda for her garden. The Japanese are outraged the following year when an exhaustive list of tribute demands arrives written on a sheet of panda skin.

1925
Kermit and Theodore Roosevelt, Jr. earn the dubious distinction of being the first foreigners to shoot a panda… at the Bronx Zoo. The teenaged Chiang Chingkuo shoots a bison at Beijing Zoo in retaliation.

1964
The transfer of a panda from London zoo to Moscow provokes clashes along the Sino-Soviet border. Hostilities only cease when Chichi is smuggled back into West Berlin in the trunk of a black and white Trabant.

2005
China offers two pandas to Taiwan, but because pandas are called bearcats in China and catbears in Taiwan, customs turns them away on the grounds that the shipment’s contents do not match their description.

* May not correspond to historical reality.