Greetings one at all, Lausl Montgomery here with the exciting conclusion of our series produced for you especially to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the China History Podcast.

Today's episode is going to run a little long, hope you don't mind, but as you can see, still

kept the regular list pricing. Well, Nixon had landed, he shook hands with Joe and Lye, and now the show was about to begin.

A lot of time had passed since Nixon had sent that memo to Henry Kissinger,

requesting him to start exploring ways to normalize relations with Beijing.

Over the past six episodes, we have seen how this most able of statesmen took the lead in making

this initiative happen. Now it was time to make everything

official. The big question on the way over the Pacific was whether or not

Nixon would actually get the chance to meet Mao. This was by no means assured,

mainly because Mao wasn't doing too well, and as I mentioned, you never knew if he

was going to be healthy enough to meet anyone publicly, let alone the leader of the free world.

After the Linbiao incident, you could say...

Well, Mao lost a bit of face there. This didn't look good. His second in

command, the man behind the little red book, turning on him. And when Chairman

Mao tried to start making amends, one of the signature acts of contrition he performed was to attend the funeral of Marshall Chen Yee, a month prior to Nixon's visit.

And already not very well, Chairman... month prior to Nixon's visit.

And already not very well, Chairman Mao,

went out into the freezing cold of the Beijing winter

to the funeral home to pay his respects

to one of modern China's better leaders, not to mention a great revolutionary soldier.

And at Marshall Chen E's funeral, he attempted to put on a good show in front of everyone, you know, who had all been

burned by Mao in one form or another, and he caught a dose of pneumonia that

...