Natural History Museum

This guide to the Natural History Museum in Chengdu opens on a nineteen forty-one panda hunt across seven mountain districts, led not by a hunter but by David Crockett Graham, an Arkansas-born missionary turned museum curator. It traces the decade before, when the Smithsonian paid Graham each summer to comb Sichuan for specimens, filling crates with birds, fish, insects and mammals headed east across the Pacific. By nineteen forty-two he had shipped hundreds of thousands of animals, more than two hundred of them species science had never named. Look for what he chose to keep behind, in the cases around you.