the morning, Chungking time, in early November, 1941, they were unable to get a response from RCA and went ahead with the broadcast blind. In the end, the atmospheric conditions prevented the broadcast from going through, and the American public had to get the news from the daily press. The Pandas were then flown to Hong Kong under cover of night and from there to the Philippines on the Hong Kong Clipper. From there, they took a circuitous route by ship to San Francisco. Unfortunately, while they were en route, Pearl Harbor was bombed; and, when they arrived in San Francisco, front page news was all about war. While the Pandas did get attention, they weren’t the top of the news across the nation as had been hoped. Cold War diplomacy While the Republic of China used giant pandas for diplomatic means as early as 1941, the People's Republic of China began to use panda diplomacy more prominently in the 1950s and has continued the practice into the present day. Between 1957 and 1983, 24 pandas were gifted to 9 nations as gestures of friendship. These nations included the Soviet Union, the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, the United States of America, and the United Kingdom. When President Nixon visited China in 1972, Mao Zedong promised to send two pandas to an American zoo. In exchange, Nixon gifted two musk oxen to the Chinese. The mutual gifts illustrated the growing diplomatic relationship between China and the United States at the time. Despite the long history of panda diplomacy, the arrival of the pandas in 1972 marked the first time a panda had been in the United States in over twenty years. Upon the pandas' arrival in April 1972, First Lady Pat Nixon donated them to the National Zoo in Washington, D.C., where she welcomed them in an official ceremony. Over 20,000 people visited the pandas the first day they were on display, and an estimated 1.1 million visitors came to see them the first year they were in the United States. The pandas were wildly popular and China's gift was seen as an enormous diplomatic success, evidence of China's eagerness to establish official relations with the U.S. It was so successful that British Prime Minister Edward Heath asked for pandas for the United Kingdom during a visit to China in 1974. Pandas Chia-Chia and Ching-Ching arrived at the London Zoo