President visits with longtime Laotian friends

President Xi Jinping, on a state visit to Laos, met on Tuesday with a Laotian family that he had come to know as a teenager when he went to school with some of them in Beijing.

Xi spoke with children and grandchildren of the late Quinim Pholsena, a revolutionary leader who was foreign minister of Laos from 1962 to 1963. Several of Pholsena's children lived and studied at Bayi School in Beijing in the 1960s, when Xi also was a student there.

During their informal talk, Xi recalled that he had met his Laotian peers in sixth grade. He said he was impressed with how well they were dressed, with the boys in brown corduroy trousers and the girls often in elegant traditional dresses.