Seashell echoes poet's ties to China

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.