Why can't state visits be about important stuff any more? When David Cameron flies home from China on Wednesday after a three-day tour, he will be hoping to bring with him a thick sheaf of lucrative business deals. Pah. Ted Heath came back from Beijing in 1974 with a pair of giant pandas, Ching Ching and Chia Chia, which were housed to great fanfare at London zoo. That's what I call a souvenir.
Chairman Mao's gift to Heath came two years after he had given Hsing-Hsing and Ling Ling to Richard Nixon, following the American president's own ground-breaking visit in 1972. And as cabinet papers, released in the summer under the 30-year rule, revealed, Margaret Thatcher's closest aide, cabinet secretary Robert Armstrong, urged her in 1983 to repeat the trick (though it was stressed she should ask for a fertile female, since Ching Ching had proved a disappointment in that respect).
"Panda diplomacy" became a key feature of Chinese relations with the west in the 1950s, with 23 of the critically endangered bears given as tokens of Chinese largesse to nine countries before the mid-1980s. The bears, of which as few as 1,500 may now survive in the wild, are notoriously difficult – and expensive – to house, however; London zoo was forced to appeal for public funds to help keep up with Ching Ching and Chia Chia's enormous bamboo appetite.
Britain has done rather well for pandas in the past, having been home to 14 in total since five were smuggled out of China by a Japanese-American adventurer in 1938, three of which were sold to London zoo. The cub, Ming, caused a sensation in her six years at the zoo, before dying after a fit on Boxing day 1944, an act that earned her an obituary in the Times.
There are currently thought to be 46 giant pandas living in zoos outside China, from Mexico City to Adelaide. But, since 1984, the bears are no longer given by China to grateful nations, instead being rented on 10-year leases and at highly lucrative rates of around $1m (£600,000) a year.
It was on these terms that Edinburgh zoo secured Tian Tian and Yang Guang in 2011, after a delicate five-year lobbying campaign requiring the combined star power of Alex Salmond, David Miliband and Prince Andrew.
Their arrival was announced during a state visit by then vice premier Li Keqiang in January that year. David Cameron, it should be noted by contrast, has brought as gifts for his Chinese hosts this week a copy of Charles Moore's biography of Margaret Thatcher, Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel and a framed photograph of himself and his wife Samantha. That's not even trying.
So is there any chance at all of a fluffy surprise smuggled home in Cameron's hand luggage this time? "It's nothing to do with us," a spokeswoman from ZSL London Zoo said. Edinburgh Zoo too had no information on a panda gift.
The only hope, in that case, will lie with a home-grown panda. Unhappily, however, an eagerly awaited pregnancy for Tian Tian earlier this year, achieved through artificial insemination, ended in miscarriage in October. The zoo will try again in the spring.
