![]() tourist T-shirts, on farecards for the new Metrorail system, on the logo for the zoo’s own fundraising group. ![]() In the Washington of my childhood, on the other hand, the pandas were everywhere: On D.C. His request was greeted with an awkward silence.) Bush visited the facility in 1975 and asked to see it. One of them soon died, a fact that was discovered only when U.S. (The American reciprocal gift wasn’t quite so sensational: A pair of musk oxen whose provenance wasn’t even mentioned on the plaque at Beijing’s zoo. The president himself came to the welcome party, embracing the pandas as an emblem of his historic statecraft - and a bona fide popular sensation where lines to see the exhibit could be an hour deep. More than 20,000 people came to see the 18-month-olds on their first weekend. Within two months of that dinner with the Nixons, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling had landed at Andrews Air Force Base en route to the zoo, history’s most adorable diplomatic gesture. ![]() “Panda diplomacy” was also a useful PR tool. By the time of the cultural revolution, they were ubiquitous in consumer brands and officially sanctioned art, according to Elena Songster, a historian who has written a book-length political history of the species. Because pandas hadn’t been part of the iconography of the old imperial court, the uniquely Chinese animal became an acceptable way of expressing national pride under the People’s Republic. The first lady may not have known it, but the species was freighted with significance for the Communist government.
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