Queen of the World: Elizabeth II: Sovereign and Stateswoman

by Robert Hardman

  This was, and remains, one of the most significant tours in royal history. It was only the second state visit to a communist country, following the Queen’s 1972 trip to Tito’s Yugoslavia, but on a completely different scale. If it was not quite up there with US President Richard Nixon’s 1972 trip to China (which went on to be the subject of an opera), it was still a global diplomatic breakthrough closely observed not just in Britain but around the world. In the words of the Los Angeles Times, it was ‘one of the most symbolic turnabouts in 20th century history’. The omens were certainly very promising ahead of the visit. Pedantic world-class sticklers for protocol they might be, but the Chinese would be very happy to break all their own rules for this trip. Nothing would be too much trouble for the honoured guests, Queen Elizabeth II, Yilishabai Nuwang (or ‘Bixia’ – ‘Your Majesty’) and her consort, Feilipu Qinwang. The invitation to make a state visit had been issued two years earlier by the elderly Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping.¶ It would set the seal on the historic Joint Declaration on Hong Kong, signed by Deng and Margaret Thatcher in 1984. This agreed that the colony would revert to Chinese rule in 1997, but with a fifty-year transition period known as ‘One Country. Two Systems’. The compromise deal would avert both a collapse in the markets and an exodus of millions of Hong Kong Chinese to Britain. The decision to send the Queen to China would not only show faith in the Chinese, but would reassure both Hong Kong’s people and its stock market. On top of that, it would herald a new era in UK–Chinese relations.

  The Queen was bringing her Royal Yacht, too, and the Chinese were determined to keep it unblemished. Special tiles were ordered from Holland to line the sides of Chinese ports in order to protect the Royal Yacht’s paintwork. The plans for the Queen’s banquet were a further indication of Chinese esteem. She was keen to host it on board Britannia in Shanghai, a clear breach of the Chinese rule that all state banquets should be in Peking (as the Foreign Office still called Beijing). Not only was this breaking protocol but the Chinese President and official head of state, Li Xiannian, was unwell. According to a confidential Foreign Office memo marked ‘Gossip’, he had recently suffered a series of ‘heart attacks’. Li’s officials were therefore most reluctant to let him fly to Shanghai for the Queen’s dinner. However, on being informed of the plan, Li himself had replied: ‘Why not?’

  Shanghai was being given an extensive makeover in the Queen’s honour. China’s largest clock, on top of the Shanghai customs building, had just been repaired, so that it would chime once again for the first time since the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese wanted its ‘Big Ben’ chimes to make the Queen ‘feel at home’.

  The standard plan for any normal state visitor to China was to spend three days in Peking and then visit two other cities. The Queen, however, would visit five. With two weeks to go, the Ambassador, Richard Evans, had run out of embossed invitations and was ordering more from London. As usual, every business in the land was itching for a royal introduction. ‘I appreciate that the royal party will have a very busy timetable but since our company has traded with China since 1898, I do feel that a fund of goodwill built up over many years by companies such as ours will do much to make the royal visit a happy and memorable occasion,’ a Mr E. J. Dickson of Bethell Brothers wrote to the Foreign Office. His begging letter did the trick.

  On 12th October 1986, the Queen emerged from her chartered British Airways Tristar in a white hat and lemon-yellow dress, telling the welcoming party: ‘I’m very glad to come to China.’ As we know from the minutes of the Royal Visits Committee in Whitehall earlier, this was entirely true. She had been wanting to come for years. Even royal aides, numbed by years of watching the precision marching of the Household Division, were impressed by the drill at the welcome ceremony in Tiananmen Square.#

  One of the first engagements was the Queen’s meeting with Deng Xiaoping. ‘It was a memorable lunch, just eight of us,’ says former Private Secretary, Sir William Heseltine. ‘Deng greeted the Queen by saying what an honour it was that Her Majesty should have taken the trouble to come to lunch with an old man like him. To which she responded with one of her favourite lines: “Why, you’re the same age as my mother, and she doesn’t think of herself as being old at all”.’

  As lunch began, it was soon clear to the Queen that her host was uncomfortable. ‘We’d been sitting at the table for about ten minutes and the Queen was sitting opposite Deng,’ former Foreign Secretary Lord (Geoffrey) Howe told William Shawcross. ‘She noticed he was fretting uneasily and she remembered he was a chain smoker. She leant across to me and said: “I think Mr Deng would be rather happier if he was allowed to smoke”. I told him that and I have never seen a man light up more cheerfully than that. It was a very human touch and he appreciated it.’ Feeling somewhat liberated, Deng didn’t hold back on the spittoon either, firing off a volley into a receptacle a yard from his chair. ‘She did not move a muscle,’ her press secretary, Michael Shea, recalled later. ‘He spat, as is Chinese custom, and the Duke of Edinburgh let out a guffaw. We all looked around and the Queen just didn’t move.’ Mrs Thatcher had been less phlegmatic on her first meeting with Deng in 1982. As Lord Butler told her biographer, Charles Moore, she was taken aback when the ageing premier started hawking in front of her. ‘She moved her legs,’ he told Moore. ‘It threw her.’

  ‘Deng was full of good humour during the luncheon,’ the British Ambassador, Richard Evans, reported back to London. It was the same with Hu Yaobang, General Secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, who ‘was at his most lively when conducting the Queen and Duke on a guided tour of some of the older buildings in the former Imperial City’. Both sides were delighted by the other’s words at Li Xiannian’s opening state banquet. ‘We have made great achievements but have not yet totally freed our country from economic and technological backwardness,’ said Li in an unexpectedly frank address. ‘The British people, a great people full of wisdom and creativeness, have made outstanding contributions to human civilisation and social progress.’

  The Queen voiced Britain’s admiration for Chinese progress and its readiness to ‘contribute to the realisation of China’s plans for the future’. There was a joke about the first British emissary to China, lost at sea along with Elizabeth I’s letter to the Emperor of Cathay – ‘fortunately postal services have improved since 1602’ – plus a clever reference to Deng’s ‘One Country. Two Systems’ mantra. ‘The future lies with the young,’ said the Queen. ‘From such contacts come a growing recognition that we have two traditions but one hope for the future.’

  The Chinese leadership had been ‘quite exceptionally friendly’ to the Queen and the Duke, the Ambassador noted, and he was struck by the genuinely animated atmosphere at all the social events. ‘It is often the case in China that conversation never really gets going at formal dinner parties,’ he wrote in his post-tour telegram. ‘It certainly did in Shanghai.’

  There the crowds were of a magnitude seldom seen since the early years of the reign. ‘The State Visit stirred considerable emotion among the Chinese,’ Sir Richard reported. He was informed by the Chinese authorities that two million people had lined the streets from the old city to Britannia’s berth, to watch the Queen arrive at her state banquet for Li Xiannian. A million of them were still there at midnight to see her drive from the Royal Yacht to the State Guest House, where protocol required that the royal couple should sleep while in Shanghai. For the first time anyone could remember, the Bund – Shanghai’s waterfront – was illuminated from end-to-end all night. The Queen provided another first for the colossal crowds lining the streets. Whereas it was the norm for Chinese leaders to travel everywhere at speed in blacked-out cars, she insisted on travelling slowly with the lights on in her limousine to give everyone a good look.

  It was all going magnificently. The Foreign Secretary was also hitting it off with the premier (China’s equivalent of Prime Minister), Zhao Ziyang. The British Embassy eagerly telexed London to report Geoffrey Howe’s fruitful dinner discussion
with Zhao, noting that he had ‘paid tribute to privatisation and contracting out’ and ‘suggested that most countries were currently thinking on these lines’. Mrs Thatcher would be pleased, even more so when she learned of Britannia’s commercial activity.

  While the Queen was not on board, Britannia had been touting for trade with trips up and down the Huangpu and Yangtze Rivers. A number of contracts had been signed. ‘If the business foreshadowed were all to come to maturity, exports worth several tens of millions of pounds will have been generated,’ the British Ambassador told his masters.

  And so, having dealt with the political and commercial imperatives of the tour, the Queen and Duke could relax a little. The Ambassador would single out three unforgettable sights from the tour in his confidential despatch: the Queen and the Duke at the Great Wall of China, her voyage across the Dianchi Lake near Kunming and the Terracotta Warriors of Xian. One of the great archaeological discoveries of the age, this army of thousands of clay figures was buried with a great Chinese emperor in 209 BC and was rediscovered in 1974. Surrounded, as ever, by a similar army of officials in suits, the Queen and Duke stood at the edge of the airport-sized pit, staring down at the earthenware battalions stretching into the distance. ‘There was this great hush,’ one of those present later recalled. At which point one of the British reporters present could be heard muttering a passable imitation of the Duke in walkabout mode: ‘And how long have you been a terracotta warrior?’ Several members of the British party, including it is said the Queen, found themselves biting back the giggles.

  The Queen and the senior members of the royal party were then given special permission to descend. ‘We were allowed to step in to the pit and walk amongst them as though we were part of the army,’ said Geoffrey Howe. ‘One felt a tremendous sense of privilege and she was as enthusiastic and struck by it as I was.’

  The mood of levity and wonder would not last very long afterwards. A group of British undergraduates on a student exchange from Edinburgh University were then introduced to the Duke, in his capacity as Chancellor of the University. It was, by all accounts, a light-hearted chat, during which the Duke asked them about their studies. Jollying the conversation along, he is supposed to have joked: ‘If you stay here much longer you’ll all be slitty-eyed.’ When they, in turn, asked him about his own trip, he let slip that he found the pollution of Peking ‘ghastly’. Moments later, the royal convoy was on its way, while a couple of members of the British press stayed behind, wandering among the crowd asking people for their impressions and recollections of the event. On a royal tour, with minimal time and space at many events, it is normal for the press to divide up different engagements and then swap notes afterwards, a system known as ‘pooling’. Back on the media coach, heading for the airport, one reporter started reading back his quotes from the Edinburgh student, Simon Kirby. At which point one veteran tabloid reporter yelled out: ‘Stop the bus!’ In the days before mobile phones, a public phone box was still the best means of reporting a story. And this one was clearly destined for the front page.

  The headlines are well known. ‘Philip Gets It All Wong’ screeched The Sun the next day, applying Fu Manchu-style touch-ups to a photo of the Duke. The paper’s headline was much the same the following day: ‘Queen Velly Velly Angry’. The Duke’s friends have always pointed out that his supposed ‘gaffes’ were only ever a good-natured way of helping along a sticky conversation.

  British diplomats did their best to play down the story. Reporting his ‘principal impressions’ of the tour to the Far Eastern department in London, Richard Evans reported that ‘The Chinese pulled out all the stops.’ After a fairly lengthy summary of the tour, he came to the unavoidable crux: ‘It was, of course, unfortunate that the Duke of Edinburgh spoke as he did to the students from Edinburgh. I was out of earshot and so do not know precisely what he said (I have heard many versions). It was equally unfortunate that Kirby and the others were so ready to speak to the journalists who besieged them immediately after HRH had moved on (I do not think that they had any idea of the likely consequences). The handling of the incident by the Chinese was well-judged.’ That was one way of describing the Chinese response. They had, in fact, instructed the media not to mention it at all.

  In his subsequent official despatch, Sir Richard (as he had become following his knighthood from the departing Queen) devoted many pages to the success of the tour, before alluding to ‘one incident which will have given people outside China the impression that the State Visit was less than a perfect success’. Avoiding any use of the Duke’s alleged words, the Ambassador accused several British papers of being ‘thoroughly offensive’ and pinned all blame for the incident squarely on the press themselves. ‘The Chinese Government is in no way disturbed by what the Duke of Edinburgh is alleged to have said, but is angry about the way in which a section of the British press published reports offensive to HRH at a time when he was a guest of the Chinese president.’

  The incident, however, would not be brushed off so easily at the Foreign Office. On 21st November, a month after the tour, Thorold Masefield of the Far Eastern department circulated a blunt report attacking the FCO’s entire approach to state visits and its lack of clear objectives. The Queen’s tours, he insisted, should receive the same sort of preparation as the Prime Minister’s. ‘There is at present no process for writing up objectives for State Visits,’ he warned. Advice was being ‘fed piece-meal into the Palace’ and briefings for the Queen seemed to consist of ‘rather bland generalised background information’. He added: ‘Much of this must already be known to the Queen. Interesting points, particularly those to get across to the Queen’s hosts, are largely omitted.’

  While television had provided some good coverage and scenic shots, he pointed out that the press had been given little fresh material. ‘Perhaps, inevitably, their reports concentrated on trivia (sea slugs, spittoons, slitty eyes). Fuller daily briefing of the press corps, not on the details of the Queen’s dress but on the relevance of the day’s events to Sino/British relations, could have given them something else to write about.’

  The embassy had a few other challenges, too. Before leaving China for Hong Kong, the Governor of Guangdong presented the Queen with an unusual bonsai jasmine tree in a bamboo cage for her garden at Windsor. The cage was too large to fit through the door of the small plane flying the Queen to Hong Kong, and the tree was too fragile to go in the hold, so the Chinese gave it a first-class train ticket to Hong Kong where it could be reunited with the Queen. By now, Foreign Office staff had given it a name – Jack – and arranged a police escort to Hong Kong airport, where it was placed in the Queen’s plane for the journey home. Back in Britain, it had to enter the Ministry of Agriculture quarantine station at Harpenden. Philip Rouse of the FCO was sent to pick it up in his car. When it wouldn’t fit in to that either, he had to borrow a British Airways truck. It finally reached the quarantine station at midnight, where the manager had been staying up to greet it. Rouse reported back to the embassy in Peking that the Ministry official was a ‘Bonsai buff’ who ‘went down on his knees in ecstasy and delight’. Eventually, the tree passed quarantine and was last seen in a greenhouse in Windsor Great Park.

  Over at the Foreign Office, officials found themselves fielding the usual complaints about the Queen’s transport arrangements. Once again, there had been grumbles from British executives that she had flown to China in a US-built Tristar and had been driven around Peking in a Mercedes. ‘De Gaulle would always use French manufacturers on foreign tours,’ British businessman Tom Lyon wrote to Sir James Cleminson of the British Overseas Trade Board. ‘If I came to your home and was not served Coleman’s Mustard, I’d sell my shares!’ The letter was one of many circulated around different Whitehall departments. Eric Beston of the Department of Trade and Industry offered a succinct defence: ‘Departure from China on board HM Yacht can hardly be faulted.’

  For all the glitches, the visit had achieved its overall aim of pushing open the do
or to the greatest closed society on Earth. It had reassured the millions of people living in Hong Kong and British businesses and diplomats had derived great benefits, too. The Chinese had certainly regarded it as a great success and were keen to discuss future royal visits. Princess Margaret would be in Peking in a matter of months. As ever, all this new-found goodwill would remain at the mercy of political events. The suppression of protests in Tiananmen Square three years later would put a halt to further royal visits for the time being, as would tensions in the run-up to the Hong Kong handover in 1997.

  Thereafter, though, the royal connection would flourish once again. Chinese leaders enjoyed no fewer than three state visits to Britain between 1999 and 2015. No other nation has been a more regular guest at the Palace in recent times. So much for the ‘gaffe’.

  RUSSIA, 1994

  The crew of Britannia had seen some strange sights over the years – icebergs, whales, a revolution,** the Queen Mother cooking bacon and eggs, and members of the Royal Family in fancy dress performing cabaret turns. Yet they had never seen anything quite like the sights that greeted them as they approached the Russian city of St Petersburg. All along the banks of the River Neva, there were rusting hulks everywhere. ‘The Cold War had only just come to an end and I had spent my whole grown-up naval life with Cold War rules,’ says Britannia’s former captain, Sir Robert Woodard. ‘There were these amazing ships covered in rust with clothes lines all over the guns. They hadn’t paid their sailors for weeks. They’d been chucked out of lodgings and were living on board with their families, which was extraordinary. Then there were redundant submarines filling up and emptying with the tide on one side and completely derelict merchant ships on the other, which quite narrowed the river.’ It would be the only time that Britannia’s navigation officer was reduced to taking bearings from advertising billboards since the local nautical charts were of little use. Such was the state of post-Soviet Russia in 1994.