The Boehm Porcelain Co. of Trenton, New Jersey
So I hear this joke.
What do you bring to China? What do you give an emperor?
It is 1972. You cannot bring maps, or chiming clocks, or telescopes, or perspective. A piece of moon rock brought by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to Mao on an earlier visit was met with disdain.
So President Nixon brings a pair of Alaskan musk oxen and a Californian redwood tree.
And porcelain.
He brings a sculpture of a pair of mute swans with their cygnets, three feet long and three feet high, made by the Boehm Porcelain Co. of Trenton, New Jersey. Boehm specialised in accurate representations of birds in porcelain, ‘a medium in which one can portray the everlasting beauty of form and colour of wildlife and nature’. They have a brass plaque attached to their oak base explaining that they are a gift to His Excellency Chairman Mao Tse-tung and the people of the People’s Republic of China &c.
It is tribute, of course. No different from those centuries of sending white stallions or coffers of gold, strange vases of a white material, translucent.
President Nixon flies back to America with a pair of pandas, Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, leaving behind a fudged declaration on the status of Taiwan and his own imperial porcelain, Nixonware.