A diamond hewn out of the snow

A Chinese watercolor-on-silk painting by artist Guo Yidan, depicting the meeting between Edgar Snow and the Dimond couple at Snow's home in Switzerland in 1971. On Sept 15, 1971, E. Grey Dimond, 53, found himself crossing the border between Hong Kong and the Chinese mainland, from what he called "neon China" to New China, half a year before US president Richard Nixon stepped onto the ground at the airport in Beijing to begin what he called his "week that changed the world". He was to verify some reports filed by his fellow Kansas City native Edgar Snow, based on the man's own previous travel to China during which he was invited to ascend the rostrum in Tian'anmen Square at a time when the US and China were estranged. "The participants … were stimulating, but the man who brought real excitement to the gathering was the expatriate American author Edgar Snow," Dimond, who married Clark's daughter Mary Clark, and was at the conference, later wrote. "In Dublin, Edgar Snow and Dr. Dimond shared adjoining rooms with a bathroom－proof of a very special kind of friendship," said Nancy Hill, Dimond's personal assistant for the last decade of his life.