The Taoiseach, Mr Ahern, came to China to boast of Ireland's growth rate, expanding exports, declining unemployment and it's bright future as a trading partner. The Chinese President, Mr Jiang Zemin, already knew most of this as he made clear to Mr Ahern when they met in the state guest house in Beijing.
He was also well acquainted with the details of the Good Friday agreement and "was totally au fait with the nuances", Mr Ahern said.
But as far as Mr Jiang was concerned Ireland is still first and foremost a country which produces great writers. He listed the Nobel prizes won by Irish authors right up to the poet Seamus Heaney. "I would say," he concluded, according to his translator, "that the Irish are a genius people for literature. Why, most of them seem to have won the Nobel Prize for literature."
The communist party leader is also a fan of George Bernard Shaw, and he recalled the excitement in Shanghai when the playwright met the famous left-wing Chinese writer Lu Shin.
Another Chinese person clued in to the intricacies of Northern Ireland is a student of diplomacy from Anhui province called Hu Wen.
Ms Hu was one of the undergraduates who asked questions of Mr Ahern after his keynote speech at Beijing's Foreign Affairs College.
The Taoiseach faced the terraced rows of students and teachers from a long podium at which he was joined by the Chinese Ambassador to Ireland, Mr Zheng Jinjiong, and Ireland's Ambassador to China, Mr Joe Hayes (though the junior minister, Mr Tom Kitt, replaced Mr Hayes and the envoy had to find a place in the second row of the lecture room).
The Taoiseach's comprehensive speech dealt at length with human rights - the ambitious young diplomats constituted a "safe audience" for this topic - and detailed Ireland's role in the world as a fast-growing economy, and most of the subsequent questions dealt with non-controversial economic issues.
The peace process got a brief airing again when an unlikely figure intruded into the dining room of the Chang'an Club, beside Tiananmen Square, looking for the Taoiseach, who was preparing to leave after a luncheon hosted by Beijing's Irish Business Network. "Where is he?" demanded the familiar-looking personage, who turned out to be Sir Edward Heath, British Prime Minister at the time of the 1973 Sunningdale Agreement.
Despite the fact that Sir Edward, a frequent visitor to China, and his friends had been ejected from the dining room to make way for the Irish party, he was simply coming to pay his respects to one of the architects of Sunningdale Mark 11.
Earlier, Mr Ahern and his partner, Ms Celia Larkin, had spent some time exploring the Forbidden City. The motorcade took them there past Irish flags flapping in front of Chairman Mao's famous portrait which adorns the entrance. Today they will visit the Great Wall before flying off to Shanghai on the third day of Mr Ahern's ground-breaking visit to China.