Gifts from one ruler to another have been a staple of diplomacy since before there were countries. One of the oldest and best known stories in the world, that of the Trojan Horse, centers around a gift – albeit a deceitful one.
Fortunately, not all diplomatic gifts contain a squadron of elite soldiers bent on infiltrating and conquering your city. Let’s take a look at some of the biggest, the oddest, and the most expensive gifts that countries have given each other. Some of them will warm your heart, some are elaborate symbols, and some are plain weird.
But who knows what kind of gifts countries will be exchanging a thousand years from now?
The Statue of Liberty
The iconic copper statue was shipped to the United States from France in 1886 to thank America for inspiring the French to revolt against their monarchy. The French thought a statue of the Roman goddess of freedom, Libertas, a fitting tribute to the change the American Revolution brought to Western democracy by winning independence from Britain.
It stands 93 metres tall and cost over five million dollars in today’s currency.
A Christmas Tree
When Norway fell to the Nazis during WW2, Britain gave their exiled government refuge so that they could coordinate their resistance. Now, ever since 1947 Norway has sent a 20+ metre spruce tree to the UK every year. It stands in Trafalgar Square for the whole of the Christmas season to commemorate that assistance.
Giant Pandas
When Richard Nixon visited China in 1972 it represented the end of 25 years of no diplomacy between the USA and China. Such a historic occasion necessitated an equally momentous gift. Giant pandas Ling-Ling and Hsing-Hsing lived in the National Zoo in Washington until their deaths in 1992 and 1999 respectively. China has been in the practice of gifting giant pandas to other countries since as far back as the Tang dynasty when an empress sent a pair of pandas to the Emperor of Japan in 685.
Tulips
Just as Britain sheltered the Norwegian government, Canada offered refuge to the Dutch royal family when the Nazis invaded the Netherlands in 1940. The Netherlands still sends 100,000 tulips to Canada every year and have even specially developed a red and white tulip that resembles the Canadian flag.
The Sword of Stalingrad
The Battle of Stalingrad lasted five months and lost the Axis powers over one million men. The Red Army lost hundreds of thousands too but their willpower, size, and unrelenting spirit carried them to victory. That 1943 battle, overseen by Joseph Stalin, arguably changed the course of the entire war.
King George VI of the United Kingdom commissioned a bejewelled, ceremonial longsword to be specially forged and presented to Stalin as a gift to to the Soviet defenders of the city of Stalingrad. Tom Beasley, one of the craftsmen who forged the sword, left his hospital bed in order to make it. Upon its completion, he returned to hospital.
iPods and DVDs
When newly sworn-in president Barack Obama visited the UK in 2009 he gifted the UK’s then prime minister, David Cameron, a 25-disc box set of classic American films. In return, David Cameron gave him a pair of wellington boots and Hobgoblin ale. Obama also presented the 82 year old Queen with an iPod loaded with the Rodgers and Hammerstein showtunes she is known to love and video and photographs of the queen’s 2007 visit to Jamestown, Richmond and Williamsburg, Va.
A whale’s tooth
Speaking of Queen Elizabeth II, when she visited Fiji in 1977, local chiefs offered her the most prized possession any Fijian ruler can possess, a whale’s tooth.
A giraffe
Muhammad Ali of Egypt presented King Charles X of France with a giraffe in 1827 – the first France had ever had. The French were immediately seized with ‘giraffemania’, creating songs, instrumental music, poems, music-hall sketches, dishes, hairstyles and clothing all themed around the giraffe. The giraffe herself survived for 18 years in Paris after which she was stuffed and mounted in the natural history museum La Rochelle where she still stands today.
A camel
In 2013, President François Hollande of France received a baby camel from Mali after French troops intervened to drive back Islamist rebels who had seized the north of the country. Unfortunately, when the president left his camel in the care of a family in Timbuktu, they misunderstood the purpose of the custody arrangement and proceeded to slaughter the camel and feast on it. According to local reports, it was fashioned into a tasty tagine, a regional type of slow-simmered stew.
The Amber Room
Prussian King Frederick William I gifted his ally Tsar Peter the Great of the Russian Empire a chamber decorated in panels in 350 shades of amber backed with gold leaf and mirrors in 1716. The room was installed in the Catherine Palace and dubbed the Eighth Wonder of the World. After expansion and several renovations, it covered more than 55 square metres (590 sq ft) and contained over six tonnes (13,000 lb) of amber. It took more than ten years to construct.
Notable mentions:
The Prince Philip Movement, a sect of a tribe in Vanuatu who worship himas a deity gifted Philip a straw penis sheath in 2010.
In an attempt to improve relations, the USA presented Russia with a symbolic ‘reset button’. Turns out, a big, red button as a gift between two countries who spent 50 years threatening to nuke each other isn’t the most thought-through gift though. Especially when the wrong Russian word is written on it – ‘overcharge’ instead of ‘reset’.
And last of all, we return to Prince Philip who received perhaps the oddest looking diplomatic gift of all time in 1972 from Georges Pompidou, then French president.
It was a six foot long wine cooler in the shape of a grasshopper that could be unfolded into a drinking table.