Xi’s present for PM Modi to be a symbol of friendly relations
BEIJING:President Xi Jinping will head to Chennai for the second informal summit with India from Friday bearing a gift for Prime Minister Narendra Modi, but like much of the meet, details of the present are yet to be disclosed.
What is not a secret is that the gift will be a symbol of friendly relations between India, China, and Nepal.
China’s foreign ministry said on Thursday “preparations” had been made for gifts for Modi and Nepal’s President Bidhya Devi Bhandari.
“China has made preparations. The gifts embody the friendship between President Xi and the leaders of India and Nepal and the friendly relations between China, India and Nepal,” the foreign ministry said in a brief statement to Hindustan Times.
Whether Xi’s gift to Modi and Bhandari will be connected with Buddhism remains to be seen.
During last year’s Wuhan informal summit, Modi presented to Xi specially made prints of paintings by legendary Chinese artist Xu Beihong, who spent time at Santiniketan in West Bengal.
Titled The Horse and Sparrows and Grass, Xu painted them during 1939-40, when he stayed at Kala Bhavan in Santiniketan and worked under Rabindranath Tagore.
The reprints were specially ordered by the Indian Council for Cultural Research (ICCR) from Xu’s collection at Santiniketan. Xu (1895-1953) was the first visiting professor from China to stay and work in the town where the Nobel laureate penned many classic poems and novels.
In April 2017, when Xi visited US President Donald Trump, he carried a calligraphy scroll. “It was the first time the two had met and, at the time, Xi presented a calligraphy scroll to Trump, which read: ‘A terrace nine stories high comes from baskets of piled soil; a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step,’” Hong Kongbased South China Morning Post reported.