John Fairbairn posted a nice story today about Queen Elizabeth II and go on the L19 forums:
I have told this story before but it seems a good time to repeat it. Very many of the tributes to the Queen stress her sense of humour […] there is even one from the world of go - this one.
I was in Guilin, China, and I visited a department store where I noticed some weiqi equipment for sale. When I went over to have a look I was staggered to see, on the counter, flyers that depicted a very important British lady with a weiqi set. The flyer was the one below.
The flyer did not mention who this person was, and I was therefore curious as to whether ordinary Chinese knew her. So I asked the sales assistant, and soon a gaggle of other people, curious about me the foreigner, gathered round. But none of them knew the lady’s identity. So I gave them a clue: she was the most important lady in Britain.
When I returned to England, intrigued, I contacted Buckingham Palace to find out how the Queen had come to be looking at weiqi stones. I soon discovered it was a diplomatic gift of yunzi stones made to The Queen and the Duke when they visited Kunming on a State Visit in October 1986. I knew that the usual procedure for dealing with diplomatic gifts was to put them away in a warehouse called the Queen’s Warehouse […] Whenever a dignitary from the donor country next came to Britain, the idea is that gift stored there is brought out and displayed as if it was personally treasured. I wanted a photograph of these stones. But they could not be found in the warehouse.
After further investigation I was eventually told that the Queen, taking up her entitlement to keep favoured items for herself, had selected these yunzi stones to be displayed in her palace at Sandringham. What I was also told, on condition of anonymity, was that as the yunzi pieces looked just like sweeties, she would put them in a bowl, hoping unsuspecting guests would try to suck and bite them. I have no idea whether this is true, but it certainly seems to fit in with the many examples of humour we have been hearing about.