On 10 April 1971, a group of Chinese officials waited expectantly on one end of the railway bridge connecting mainland China to Hong Kong. Their guests, a group of 15 Americans, the first US delegates to China since the Communist Revolution of 1949<sup>1</sup>, slowly make their way across from Hong Kong.<br><br>Yet they were led not by President Richard Nixon, nor his right-hand man Henry Kissinger, but by long-haired, self-professed hippy Glenn Cowan, followed by his US table tennis teammates.<sup>2</sup><br><br>The visit arose from a chance encounter between Cowan and his Chinese counterpart Zhuang Zedong. They had met at the world championships in Japan earlier that month when Cowan accidentally boarded the Chinese team’s shuttle bus. Zhuang, ignoring official rules prohibiting interaction with the Americans, approached Cowan and presented him with a silk-screen print of the Huangshan mountains.<sup>3</sup><br><br>As images of the two men began to circulate on world media, Chinese leader Mao Zedong extended an invitation for the Americans to visit China.<br><br>The US State Department read this as an attempt by the Chinese to break the long-standing diplomatic deadlock.<sup>4</sup> Nixon responded by lifting the US trade embargo on China in June 1971, paving the way for the 1972 Shanghai Agreement in which the two powers pledged to work towards normalisation. <br><br>The efforts of both table tennis teams showed the potential for ordinary people to bypass the barriers of hostility constructed by their respective governments. On both sides of the Pacific, doors were now open for the waves of scientists, academics and journalists who followed in their footsteps over the decades. The ‘Ping-Pong Diplomats’ had ushered in a new era for US-China relations.<br>