Seashell echoes poet's ties to China

Inside one of the University of Chile's main buildings, visitors will see a seashell that carries a story far larger than its size. It is displayed among marine specimens linked to Pablo Neruda (1904-73), the Nobel Prizewinning Chilean poet known for his love of seashells, which he described as "small countries of mother-of-pearl". In 1954, he donated his private collection of thousands of shells to the university.

The shell displayed in the university's main building stands out for what it reveals about a time when culture often outpaced diplomacy.

In his memoir, Neruda describes receiving a rare shell during a visit to China: "I remember that in the Peking Museum, the most sacred box of mollusks from the China Sea was opened to give me … the Thatcheria mirabilis." He said it was one of only two known specimens of that particular mollusk.

Long before Chile and China established formal diplomatic relations in 1970, Chilean writers and artists were already taking journeys across the Pacific. They traveled, wrote, and helped build institutions that turned curiosity into exchange. Their encounters helped shape a relationship that now runs through trade, education and tourism.

"The Chinese are among the people in the world who smile the most," Neruda, who may be Chile's most famous poet, wrote in his memoir, I Confess I Have Lived, published in 1974, a year after his death.

The gift of the seashell in the early 1950s tied the visiting Latin American poet to a newly founded country. Renzo Soto, a historian and retired professor of the University of Chile, told China Daily that Neruda was part of a small but active group of Chilean writers and artists drawn to China well before embassies and official visits became routine.

"I don't know how widely his visits to China are discussed. Several Chilean authors and artists visited China before the formal establishment of diplomatic relations in 1970," Soto says.

"In the 1950s it was Neruda, Pablo de Rokha, Jose Venturelli, and Gonzalo Rojas," Soto says.

The list spans different art forms and temperaments. De Rokha was a major poet with fierce political views. Venturelli was a painter and activist with long ties to China. Rojas became one of Chile's leading poets. Each, in different ways, helped build early cultural contact.

Their visits came at a particular moment when the People's Republic of China was still in its early years, and knowledge of it among foreigners remained limited. Soto says that made it even more compelling for Chileans looking for new inspiration in a postwar world. "There was a genuine curiosity to learn about an ancient society that was relatively isolated and very difficult for foreigners to access," Soto says.

In 1954, Neruda published The Grapes and the Wind, a long work that moves through places and political causes with the voice of a committed poet. Editors and translators have noted that the poem ranges from Chile's coast to New China, using geography to imagine new nations and futures. Before long, it became a real exchange. China also embraced Neruda as a major literary figure. During his visits, he met poets such as Ai Qing (1910-96), and the two became friends. Ai Qing later traveled to Chile and joined the writers who gathered for Neruda's 50th birthday in 1954.

Li Zhen, a poetry critic and professor at Shaanxi Normal University, said that Neruda liked Ai Qing a lot and described him as "charming" and a "prince of Chinese poets".

"His trips to China, especially the deep friendship he formed with poet Ai Qing, are evidence that this rapprochement was not simply a matter of political convenience but rather a genuine human bond," said Barbara Fernandez Melleda, an assistant professor at the University of Hong Kong.

Those ties soon took institutional form. In 1952, Chileans formed a Chile-China cultural association in Santiago, one of the earliest organized efforts in Latin America to build cultural links with the People's Republic of China.

The Chilean-Chinese Institute of Culture was a prime "example of what we call 'cultural diplomacy'," Melleda told China Daily.

The institute brought together figures from across Chile's intellectual and political life, including Neruda, Venturelli, and Chile's future president, Salvador Allende. For nearly two decades, it served as a steady meeting point for discussion, exchange, and learning about China within Chile's academic and cultural circles.

"The (institute) was the concrete platform that channeled all the interest and affinity that already existed," says Melleda. "They created a legitimate space for encounter."

Neruda traveled to China in 1951 and 1957, extending his own links and those of the institute and shaping his worldview. During his last visit to China in 1957, Neruda celebrated his birthday on a cruise along the Yangtze River. Ai Qing, the head of the Chinese delegation, accompanied him on the journey.

"Neruda was never a mere repeater of slogans," Hernan Loyola, the poet's former personal secretary and a friend who edited his complete works and the Nerudiana magazine, said in an earlier interview. "The Neruda of the 1960s was no longer the poet who simply praised. He was a man who had learned to look with different eyes."

If he was able to build a bridge with China, Loyola said, "it was because his interest was genuine".

"He was not a career diplomat but a poet who had written verses dedicated to the country and had forged personal ties," Loyola said.

Neruda's legacy remains alive.

His cultural diplomacy strengthened ties between Chile and China. The links expanded through the 1950s and 1960s. When Allende became president in 1970, he took office "with 18 years of accumulated knowledge, personal contacts and trust forged through the (institute)," says Maria Montt Strabucchi, an associate professor at the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile.

"That's why, when he took office, one of his first foreign policy decisions was to establish diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China on Dec 15, 1970," Strabucchi says. "It was not an improvised or purely ideological decision: it was the culmination of a process of rapprochement that the institute had sustained for nearly two decades."

Since 1970, the economic relationship between the two countries has expanded into one of Chile's most important bilateral trade ties. Chile's trade with China had grown to about $8 billion in 2005 and exploded to almost $59 billion by 2024, according to the Chilean government. China is now Chile's largest trading partner.

The relationship deepened further through the free trade agreement framework, under which 98.7 percent of Chilean exports enter China with zero tariffs. But even though trade and investment may define Chile-China ties, writers and artists had laid the groundwork for the relationship long before that.

The seashell at the museum is a timely reminder that diplomacy is shaped not only in ministries, but also in poems, journeys and the stories people bring home.

The writer is a freelance journalist for China Daily.