A lost ledger of city’s history of diplomacy

From Soong Ching-ling to Tito, a rediscovered visitors’ book from Town Hall chronicles Delhi's pivotal role in the post-colonial world

- Paras Singh

On a December afternoon in 1955, Soong Ching-ling - known better as the “Mother of Modern China” - stood beneath the high grand Victorian Edwardian-style arches of Chandni Chowk’s Town Hall, bathed in the warmth of applause.

“India, China. Two nations resurgent. Peking, New Delhi. The new Asia arising. Peace, Friendship. One Billion Pairs of hands. Your protectors! Hindi-Chini Bhai Bhai. Hindi-Chini Bhai,” she wrote in the Town Hall's visitors’ book in Chinese, sealing the moment with the optimism of the short-lived Hindi-Chini friendship of the 1950s. Soong, an honorary president of the People’s Republic of China and a revolutionary figure in her own right, had come to New Delhi in the dawn years of India’s independence.

Back then, Delhi's Town Hall was more than a civic building — it was the city’s diplomatic salon. Under its colonnades, mayors welcomed presidents, poets, and heads of state. Civic receptions were staged with the gravity of statecraft: symbolic keys to the city exchanged hands, garlands draped over shoulders, abhinandan patra (formal letters of congratulations) read aloud as cameras clicked.

For decades, those encounters seemed to live only in fading photographs, and in the memories of dignitaries and officials who were part of these meetings.

Then, during a routine record room cleanup last year, a municipal heritage team stumbled upon piece of history.

A battered, leather-bound visitors’ book. Its spine cracked, its pages foxed and crumbling, the ledger held in its hand-inked lines the ghost of an era — signatures, messages, and sketches from foreign dignitaries who passed through Delhi from the 1950s to the 1980s.

“It’s a treasure,” said a senior official from the Indira Gandhi National Centre for the Arts (IGNCA), which is now restoring the book. “Every page tells you what the world thought of India in those formative years, and how Delhi presented itself to that world.”