Persimmon, daughter of a Jewish mold-maker and a Chinese woman, becomes a famous panda painter. Living in the forest of Chengdu Province, she adopts Bampo an orphaned panda bear, but what she has done is illegal, as only members of the royal family can own panda bears. She saves the life of Prince Ting Ling with a secret potion when he is gored by a wild boar in the forest of Chengdu, but afterward his soldiers cannot find her. A poacher alerts authorities and Persimmon is arrested and sentenced to be beheaded. Will the prince find her in time?

Persimmon, daughter of a Jewish mold-maker and a Chinese woman, becomes a famous panda painter. Living in the forest of Chengdu Province, she adopts Bampo an orphaned panda bear, but what she has done is illegal, as only members of the royal family can own panda bears. She saves the life of Prince Ting Ling with a secret potion when he is gored by a wild boar in the forest of Chengdu, but afterward his soldiers cannot find her. A poacher alerts authorities and Persimmon is arrested and sentenced to be beheaded. Will the prince find her in time?

Henry Morton Stanley undertook the greatest African expedition of the nineteenth century to rescue Emin Pasha, last lieutenant of the martyred General Gordon and governor of the southern Sudan. Emin had been cut off by an Islamic jihad to the north and was at the mercy of brutal slave traders. Instead of ten months, the trip took three years and cost the lives of thousands of people, as Stanley's column hacked its way across the last great, unexplored territory in Africa. Stanley's secret agenda was territorial expansion on the model of Leopold's Congo or the British East India Company, and what is revealed so vividly in the diaries of those who accompanied him is the dark underside of both the man and the colonial impulse. The expedition took whatever it wanted from the Africans, and when Africans were killed defending their possessions, they didn't even rate an entry in Stanley's journal.