By Tarun Basu, IANS
Beijing : In keeping with his guest’s known frugal habits, the formal banquet Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao hosted for Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and his wife Gursharan Kaur was not a very elaborate multi-course affair, but did include the famous Beijing roast duck.
The banquet in the gold-plated ornate West Hall of the Great Hall of the People was limited to four courses – the normal Chinese banquet can run into eight-nine courses and can be quite exotic for the uninitiated. It had lobster soup and sponge bamboo, Beijing roast duck, winter bamboo shoots and greens – a complete vegetarian dish that one of the guests said was quite unusual in Chinese banquets but probably was included in deference to gastronomical preferences of many Indians – and fish in sour soup.
This was rounded off with sago and pumpkin cream, pastries and fruits and accompanied by Great Wall 2002 red and white wine.
It was not known how much of it Manmohan Singh ate, but right through the two-hour dinner he was seen chatting amiably with Wen, sometimes even without the help of interpreters sitting right behind them as the leaders and senior members of both delegations sat beneath a giant grey painting called “Sun rise on Mount Tai”, a mountain in Shandong province where thinker and philosopher Confucius was born.
Diplomatic observers familiar with the ways of the Chinese leadership say that although Wen knows English, in public the leaders rarely speak in any language other than Chinese. The fact that he “dropped his guard” to speak in English with Manmohan Singh is in some ways an indicator of the level of personal chemistry the two leaders have reached over a period of several meetings since Wen’s visit to India in 2005 – and that was reflected in “positive” movement to their bilateral relations that the two leaders gave today after their talks.