On the eve of the 50th anniversary of President Richard Nixon's historic visit, veteran US diplomats relive the heady days of the 1970s' rapprochement between their country and China.

Around 2:20 pm on Feb 21, 1972, Chinese premier Zhou Enlai turned up at the Diaoyutai State Guesthouse in Beijing, where, a little more than an hour earlier, he had said goodbye to Richard Nixon, the visiting US president, whom Zhou had met at the city's Capital Airport that morning.

The official schedule had called for the president to rest, after a long journey that had brought him and his 350-member entourage from Washington to Beijing, and before the two sides engaged in some preliminary talk followed by a welcoming banquet.

"Here Zhou came and asked to see Kissinger," recalled Winston Lord, special assistant to Nixon's national security adviser Henry Kissinger. "He said that Chairman Mao wanted to see President Nixon right away."

"Kissinger, to my everlasting gratitude, asked me to go," Lord, 84, told China Daily during a recent interview.

Lord, convinced he had earned the right to sit in the chairman's book-lined study by being "a core member of the trip's preparation team and one of the world's greatest notetakers", would later "tie for first place among Americans with Kissinger in meeting with Mao five times", to use his own words.

"He (Mao) was a forceful leader just by atmosphere."

While Nixon and Mao treated themselves to a lively hourlong meeting that included philosophy, history and much banter, others were left wondering. ("I voted for you during your last election," Mao said. "I think the important thing to note is that in America, at least at this time, those on the right can do what those on the left can only talk about," Nixon said.)

"We were scheduled to gather for a plenary session to kick off the proposed counterpart discussions," wrote Nicholas Platt in his 2009 book China Boys: How U. S. Relations with the PRC Began and Grew. "It was abruptly postponed, and we waited－and waited－and waited," Platt, who on that trip was the special assistant to the US secretary of state William Rogers, told China Daily."The secretary of state was not included and, to my knowledge, not even aware of the meeting."

Fourteen months after that meeting, Platt would find himself in Beijing again, to "physically build the US Liaison Office". The 85-year-old first learned Chinese in the early 1960s, hoping that some dramatic turnaround in US-China relations would one day put him "in the thick of things".

In the thick of things was exactly how Lord felt when he, with Kissinger and two other Americans, crossed the Pakistani-Chinese border into Chinese airspace onboard Pakistani president Yahya Khan's plane. It was dawn on July 9, 1971, and the plane skirted the planet's second-tallest peak, Qiaogeli Feng, known as K2 in the West, which had reputedly killed about one out of five climbers who had tried to reach its summit.

"I was overwhelmed as much by the unraveling scenery as by the huge implications and repercussions that we were about to unleash together with the Chinese," said Lord, who "by my good fortune", was sitting ahead of all his fellow Americans on the plane at that point.

"I've said ever since then that I was the first American official to visit China since 1949. And Kissinger reluctantly agreed."

The main goal of what is known today as "Kissinger's secret trip to China" was to decide whether there would be a visit by Nixon. And Lord had been covertly preparing for that "mountaintop experience" for a year.

"If we got out in advance, those who were fiercely against any rapprochement with the Chinese, and the pro-Taiwan lobby, would be invading the White House," he reckoned. "The trip was kept a top secret, privy only to a select few." This meant that Lord had to gather for Kissinger a lot of briefing material from various bureaucracies, the CIA and State Department, for example, "in innocent ways". The material was kept in "special briefcases from the CIA with locks on them". (Later when the group went sightseeing in Beijing on "a very hot, mid-July day" during Kissinger's visit, Lord had to carry at least one of those heavy briefcases around.)

Today the best-known story from that trip was Kissinger's upset stomach. The national security adviser, on the last leg of a publicly announced trip that included Vietnam, Thailand, India and Pakistan, pleaded stomachache. While he was supposedly recuperating in a hill station, the Pakistanis, who had been acting as a major channel of communication between the Americans and the Chinese, ferreted him and his four-man group to an airport in Islamabad in the wee hours of July 9, 1971.

However, there is a twist to that story, Lord said.

"Ironically, Kissinger came down with a real stomachache in India, and covered this up as much as possible because he wanted to save his real illness until he arrived in Pakistan," said Lord, who also recalled, rather bemusedly, how Kissinger became "genuinely upset" once onboard the plane, realizing that whoever had packed his suitcase forgot to put in any extra shirt.

On July 15, four days after the secret visit, which in turn lasted for 49 hours, Nixon announced on US national TV that he planned to visit China "before May 1972", convinced that "all nations will gain from a reduction of tensions" between China and the US.

"If Mr Nixon had revealed he was going to the moon, he could not have flabbergasted his world audience more," a reporter for The Washington Post wrote, clearly having in mind what Lord dubbed the "constant propaganda exchanges and mutual isolation" that had characterized the bilateral relationship.

On Feb 17, 1972, Nixon, his wife Pat, other core members of the group including Kissinger, Lord and the secretary of state Rogers, and a half dozen reporters took off from Andrews Air Force Base in Air Force One.

The rest of the entourage, including Platt and the majority of the 87 journalists who had gleefully joined in "this voyage into the history books", were onboard two specially chartered Boeing 707s named "Ni Hao One" and "Ni Hao Two", ni hao being the Chinese equivalent of hello.

Throughout the trip, Lord, who during preparations had put together six black briefing books which, if stacked, "would easily have been more than a foot tall", continually received requests coming back from Nixon for more information.

"I have never seen any president work as hard for a single event or trip as Nixon worked for this trip," Lord said, pointing to the president's handwritten marks and annotations on almost every page of the briefing books.

"Nixon wanted to have a good sense of Chinese culture and history ... how he could work in little Chinese sayings and poetry in his toasts," he reflected, believing that the president was driven both by "a genuine interest in China" and by "his recognition of the mission's tremendous scope and challenge".

No single image spoke more powerfully about a shared willingness to take on that challenge than the handshake between Nixon and Zhou Enlai at Beijing Capital Airport on that morning of Feb 21, 1972, one that was chilly yet drenched in sunshine.

Having landed before Nixon, Platt joined the press in "an area just behind the left wing of President Nixon's aircraft after it rolled to a stop". From a worm's eye vantage point framed by the engines of the Boeing 707, he took his own films of the "historic, and some felt endless, handshake".

Lord, meanwhile, remained seated with everyone else on the president's plane, not to mar the visit's establishing shot. Yet his inclusion in the Nixon-Mao meeting barely three hours later secured his place in the diplomatic breakthrough, whose drama Lord would "run out of objectives in describing".

Calling Mao's style of conversing "self-deprecating", "casual and episodic" yet "purposeful", Lord said:"Rather than using elegant, long phrases like Zhou did, he would use analogies, metaphors and similes－brief-brushstroke comments that you had to sometimes interpret or decipher... We soon realized that he was outlining, with those broad and brief brushstrokes, the strategic policy guidelines which Zhou would then elaborate in great detail."

"Clearly, Nixon and Mao recognized each other's vision and courage in taking this important step," Lord said, pointing to Mao's decision to meet Nixon immediately upon the latter's arrival as a deliberate show of endorsement, not to be missed by anyone.

Pictures of the meeting hit the front pages of all the world's great newspapers, but Lord, sitting beside Kissinger on the picture's far right, was missing.

"Nixon and Kissinger told the Chinese: 'Please cut out Mr Lord from all of the photographs and keep secret that he was at this meeting'," Lord said. "The Chinese clearly must have been puzzled by this, but they readily went along with the request. I, of course, was disappointed."

But he understood the rationale, he said."They figured that it was humiliating enough that the national security adviser was with the president at this historic meeting, but the secretary of state was not. Now to have a third, younger person there was just too much."

The reason behind the exclusion, Lord said, was that "Kissinger and above all Nixon were suspicious of the State Department". "Nixon felt that they were more bureaucratic and incapable of bold moves. They were also very worried about leaks."

And out of the same concern, none of the US reporters were allowed to cover the meeting. The dissatisfaction, palpable though it was, had done little to take away from "the magic" to quote Platt－of the opening banquet that night, hosted by Zhou and held at the Great Hall of the People, whose size "made one feel like an ant in a movie set".

"Everyone in the president's party was invited, including aircrews and baggage handlers, flowing in an excited crowd up the staircase," said Platt, who ran into some of his journalist friends with whom he had become acquainted during his "China-watching days" as political officer at the US consulate general in Hong Kong in the 60s. "A joyful, inquisitive panda" was how he describes Stanley Karnow of The Washington Post.

The young diplomat himself was also "basking in the incongruity of the situation", one contributed to by a Chinese army band playing "sublime and authentic" American music.

The time difference between China and the US meant that while Nixon and Zhou were toasting, many Americans were sitting in front of their TV sets watching.

"The coverage led to almost instant romance and euphoria,"Lord said."This reflected an inbuilt respect and affection for the Chinese people, which certainly was reciprocated."

"This move, clearly popular around the world, also lifted the morale. The American people, fatigued and demoralized by years of domestic turmoil and the costly Vietnam War, saw that we could still act dramatically on the world stage."

He was echoing Nixon, who lamented during his inauguration speech in January 1969 that "We are caught in war, wanting peace. We are torn by division, wanting unity" and who remarked before the trip that "all Americans have a stake in this visit".

"Maybe there wasn't a sophisticated analysis of these issues like it would be among the elite, but I think the American people instinctively understood that this opening could yield diplomatic benefits for the United States," Lord said, conceding at the same time that it was "a coolheaded, hardheaded and calculated sense of geopolitics which drove our desire to open up to China".

To stabilize Asia and have more flexibility on the world stage, to gain more leverage and improve relations with the Soviet Union and to end the Vietnam War are the three major reasons listed by Lord, a major drafter of the 1973 Paris Peace Accords which eventually ended the 20-year-conflict.

Then there's the fourth, "much less important for Nixon and Kissinger but a long-range consideration", and that was "the potential of economic relations with China",Lord said.

"These issues were ones that we knew cold, but they would turn out to be crucial in the decades to follow," said Platt, referring to the fact that while Nixon and Kissinger were negotiating with Zhou on all the outstanding political issues including Taiwan and a communique, he and his boss, the secretary of state Rogers, were "relegated to deal with the nuts and bolts of exchanges, trade and travel" during meetings with the then foreign minister Ji Pengfei.

What Platt could hardly imagine at the time was that he would later spend more than a decade fastening those "nuts and bolts", as president of the Asia Society in New York between 1992 and 2004.

In 1972, he, like almost everyone else in the entourage, was busy absorbing all the sights and sounds, including the mist-shrouded view of the Western Hills on which a section of the Great Wall meanders.

Poking out of the first battlement of the ancient wall－a symbol of invincibility for China－on the morning of Feb 24, 1972, Platt saw no canons or soldiers, but turrets "fully manned by American correspondents and anchormen".

Nixon and his wife were on the wall, gazing pensively into the distance while being insatiably photographed or filmed by US reporters wearing bushy fur hats, heavy coats and for some, electric socks that a duck hunter would wear. Their long johns, under which some had been baking in the overheated state halls, were finally proving to be essential.

Perfect pictures aside, Nixon was caught in what Platt dubbed a moment of "inanity". "It surely is a great wall," was all he could initially muster when asked to comment on the scene.

Yet his effort to travel more than 11,000 kilometers to be there was indeed appreciated. Right before a Peking duck dinner that evening, Platt, who was introduced to Zhou as a speaker of Chinese, was consulted by the latter on whether it would be appropriate to quote from a Mao poem in his toast to the president."He who has not been to the Great Wall is not a real man," was the line.

"Of course," Platt replied, stunned that "he had thought it worthwhile to seek out and address the most junior person in the room".

Neither Kissinger nor Lord went to the Great Wall, or the Forbidden City which the president toured the following day amid a sprinkling of snow. Both were busy working on what became to be known as the Shanghai Communique.

In fact, the two had had some intense exchanges with Zhou over the communique during their visit the previous October. (Between Kissinger's secret visit in July 1971 and the Nixon trip there were two additional, advance trips by US personnel to China to figure out all the substantive and logistic issues for the impending presidential visit. One was this October trip that included Kissinger and Lord, the other took place in January 1972.)

"Being a firm defender of Chinese national interests, Zhou was also willing to listen to the other side, to try to understand the national interests of our side and do so respectfully although firmly," Lord said. "Rather than haggling over details and inflating positions, Zhou established clear goals and bottom lines for the Chinese side that we could try to discuss with them together with our own goals and bottom lines."

And the premier, with his "tremendous command" of all issues strategic and tactical without the help of briefing books, had inadvertently heaped pressure on Kissinger, who tried to put away during the negotiations the big briefing books prepared for him by Lord "out of ego". (Nixon, for his part, liked to talk without notes "to impress people", a tendency "carried to a super level" on his own 1972 visit, Lord said.)

In October 1971, Zhou, who Lord believes "must have checked it with Chairman Mao", came up during a later stage of the negotiation with the idea of "a different kind of communique".

Previously, Kissinger and Lord had presented the Chinese with "a rather traditional type of diplomatic communique that is not naive but that makes it look like we were instant friends or allies".

Zhou's suggestion, "unprecedented in diplomatic practice" to quote Lord, was that each side would state its own position. "He seemed to be saying that having set out our differences, we would each have protected our domestic flanks, relationships with our friends and allies, and made more credible those areas of agreement when we stated them, because we had been honest enough in the rest of the communique to make the points," Lord said.

"Kissinger and I were at first disappointed that we weren't going to have some nice document that would record the major achievements at this forthcoming summit meeting, but we soon came to see the wisdom of this approach that Zhou had advocated."

That same night Kissinger and Lord spent in their guesthouse was a "frantic" one. The Chinese had stated their positions in a draft communique. And the two needed to proceed from that, to set forth the US position and to "beef up bilateral areas where we already converged and where we could make progress".

Working in shifts from about 10 pm, Lord spent the next few hours doing a redraft of the Chinese draft communique. About 3 am he woke Kissinger, who continued the work until the two went to see the Chinese in the morning. The two sides then engaged themselves for the next two days in redrafting and counter-drafting, before "we had about 80 to 85 percent of the communique done".

The remaining part, and most contentiously the Taiwan question, were being dealt with by the two together with their Chinese counterparts while Richard and Pat Nixon toured historical sites.

"We had really tough negotiations on Taiwan, day after day, right down to the wire," Lord said.

The Shanghai Communique, which opened with separate statements from both sides instead of a joint declaration, was issued on the afternoon of Feb 28 on the grounds of the Jinjiang Hotel. (Nixon and his entourage left Beijing for Hangzhou on the morning of Feb 26, where they did more sightseeing, before arriving in Shanghai, their final stop in China, the next day.)

"There's never been a communique before in a sense like the Shanghai Communique," Lord said, referring to Zhou's approach. "Its merits have been proven because after 50 years it is still being invoked as one of the foundations of our relationship, while most communiques disappear within weeks."

The Taiwan part comes toward the end of the communique. "The Chinese side reaffirmed its position... the Government of the People's Republic of China is the sole legal government of China," it goes."The US side declared: The United States acknowledges that all Chinese on either side of the Taiwan Straits maintain there is but one China and that Taiwan is a part of China. The United States Government does not challenge that position."

One day before the communique was issued Zhou paid a surprise visit to Rogers, while "we were unpacking" in Rogers' suite in the Jinjiang Hotel, said Platt. The meeting was "cordial", and when it ended, Rogers turned to his special assistant and asked,"What was that all about?"

"I thought Zhou was trying to make up for the exclusion of Rogers from the meeting with Mao," Platt said. "Later when he got home, the US press asked him how he felt about being left out of that meeting, and Rogers' response was that the Chinese paid a lot of attention to me, particularly Premier Zhou."

At the farewell evening banquet on Feb 28, Nixon toasted the "week that changed the world". Later that night, toward the end of a group meeting in Nixon's suite, Platt, who learned Chinese after "Senator McCarthy had purged the US Foreign Service of many competent China specialists", thanked him for "making it happen". (In 1964, when France set up formal diplomatic ties with China, Platt gathered with his classmates at a Chinese language training school for aspiring young US diplomats in Taichung, Taiwan, to offer president Charles de Gaulle a "private toast".)

Nixon, who looked "drained but satisfied", accompanied Platt to the door. Placing "an avuncular arm" on his shoulder, Nixon said,"You China boys are going to have a lot more to do from now on."

Enough to fill a memoir, as it turns out. In China Boys, Platt recounts the thrill of working at the US Liaison Office, which opened in the spring of 1973, and exploring Beijing by bike.

"The best way for a foreigner to move around and see things is on two wheels, which carry him fast enough to avoid collecting a crowd, and slow enough to observe life and chat with other bikers," he wrote.

1973 was also a year Platt spent preparing and waiting for Kissinger's visit, "a mini-Nixon visit" which finally took place in November that year and included, among others, Lord and his Shanghai-born wife Bette Bao Lord, who was visiting for the first time since leaving China with her parents in 1946.

Here comes what Lord dubbed "the irony of the centrality of China in my career". In 1962, when Lord, then a young foreign service officer, decided to marry, he was told by the US State Department that to have a Chinese wife whose father was Taiwan's representative to the International Sugar Council, a satellite body of the UN, meant that "I would never work on Chinese affairs" out of confidentiality concerns.

In October 1971, as Kissinger and Lord were flying out of China from the advance trip to prepare for Nixon's visit the following year, news reached them that the UN General Assembly had passed Resolution No 2758, which recognized representatives of the People's Republic of China as China's sole legitimate representatives to the UN, resulting in the expulsion of the Taiwan representatives from the UN and all organizations related to it.

"The loss of the UN vote was deeply embarrassing, yet it established another communication channel with the Chinese," said Lord, who between that time and when the US Liaison Office in Beijing was set up, would meet regularly with Huang Hua, China's first ambassador to the UN, in a CIA safe-house in New York, "about two blocks from where I had grown up".

Between 1985 and 1989, Lord, while serving as the US ambassador to China, held at the ambassador's residence a big gathering for "the Chinese part of my family", about 17 years after he brought back a small sampling of Chinese soil for his wife at the end of Kissinger's 1971 secret trip.

Picking up his China thread after having served as the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, the Philippines and Pakistan, Platt became president of the Asia Society in New York in 1992, at a time when what Kissinger called "a global shift in the balance of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific" took place.

Having taken society members on travels that took them "up the Yangtze River and down the Silk Road" and brought the best of the society's Rockefeller Collection of Asian art to Shanghai, he concluded that "working on Asia Society programs in and about China proved the perfect bookend for a career that began and ended with the 'nuts and bolts' of foreign policy".

The two "China boys" are constantly in touch with each other and with the rest of their generation of "China Boys", although "the number of Americans still standing who were in Beijing with Nixon and kept coming back was shrinking", Platt said.

What do they have in common? Devotion to the US national interest, which "we felt would be best served by dealing with the one-fourth of the world's population and a great nation like China", Lord said.