Here comes what Lord dubbed "the irony of the centrality of China in my career". In 1962, when Lord, then a young foreign service officer, decided to marry, he was told by the US State Department that to have a Chinese wife whose father was Taiwan's representative to the International Sugar Council, a satellite body of the UN, meant that "I would never work on Chinese affairs" out of confidentiality concerns.

In October 1971, as Kissinger and Lord were flying out of China from the advance trip to prepare for Nixon's visit the following year, news reached them that the UN General Assembly had passed Resolution No 2758, which recognized representatives of the People's Republic of China as China's sole legitimate representatives to the UN, resulting in the expulsion of the Taiwan representatives from the UN and all organizations related to it.

"The loss of the UN vote was deeply embarrassing, yet it established another communication channel with the Chinese," said Lord, who between that time and when the US Liaison Office in Beijing was set up, would meet regularly with Huang Hua, China's first ambassador to the UN, in a CIA safe-house in New York, "about two blocks from where I had grown up".

Between 1985 and 1989, Lord, while serving as the US ambassador to China, held at the ambassador's residence a big gathering for "the Chinese part of my family", about 17 years after he brought back a small sampling of Chinese soil for his wife at the end of Kissinger's 1971 secret trip.

Picking up his China thread after having served as the US ambassador to Zimbabwe, the Philippines and Pakistan, Platt became president of the Asia Society in New York in 1992, at a time when what Kissinger called "a global shift in the balance of power from the Atlantic to the Pacific" took place.

Having taken society members on travels that took them "up the Yangtze River and down the Silk Road" and brought the best of the society's Rockefeller Collection of Asian art to Shanghai, he concluded that "working on Asia Society programs in and about China proved the perfect bookend for a career that began and ended with the 'nuts and bolts' of foreign policy".

The two "China boys" are constantly in touch with each other and with the rest of their generation of "China Boys", although "the number of Americans still standing who were in Beijing with Nixon and kept coming back was shrinking", Platt said.

What do they have in common? Devotion to the US national interest, which "we felt would be best served by dealing with the one-fourth of the world's population and a great nation like China", Lord said.