PHOTOS: Donald Trump Arrives in China

The moment we've been waiting for is finally here: US President Donald Trump is in China.

Will he be frustrated to discover that he can't tweet without a VPN during his three days in the capital? Or does he already have an international data roaming plan that will allow him to bypass the Great Firewall? Stay tuned to That's Shanghai to find out.

Here's our running coverage of what went down in Beijing earlier this afternoon...

3pm China Standard Time (CST)
Orange Alert! Air Force One just landed in Beijing moments ago.

Meanwhile, the Forbidden City has started preparing the decorations.

3.29pm
Twitter reacts to Trump's arrival...

3.49pm
More photos from Trump's arrival at Beijing Capital International Airport.

3.52pm
China Daily tweets that Donald and Melania Trump have just arrived at the Beijing Palace Museum in the Forbidden City.

4.11pm
China Daily reports that the Trumps met President Xi Jinping and First Lady Peng Liyuan for tea at the Hall of Embodied Treasures during their tour of the Forbidden City. There they also viewed a Peking Opera performance, watched craftsmen repair relics and visited the Palace Museum's three main halls.

As CNN notes, Trump will be the first foreign leader to dine in the Forbidden City since 1949. Which begs the question: does McDonald's deliver along Chang'an Avenue? We've heard the President likes asking his White House aides to make Quarter Pounder runs.

4.32pm
More photos from the US President and First Lady's exclusive tour of the Forbidden City.

Pretty close to what we predicted the Forbidden City part of the tour would look like when the trip was first announced earlier this year, minus the sunny blue skies:

4.46pm
Meanwhile, yesterday near the DPRK:

"Donald Trump, America’s showman president, hatched a secret plan to visit the Korean Peninsula’s demilitarised zone before he ever left Washington last week on a five-nation tour of Asia, the White House said...

"But plans for the grand reveal were botched by Mother Nature, and [White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders] described Trump as disappointed – and 'pretty frustrated.'

"The snafu is a particularly humbling moment for a win-focused president. Trump has employed increasingly tough rhetoric against North Korea over its continued nuclear and ballistic missile programmes, but found his DMZ power-play derailed by weather."

The visit was canceled due to "visibility below one mile and misting conditions," the Associated Press reports. AWKWARD!

5.01pm
Here's what the White House has to say about whether or not Trump will (be able to) tweet during his China trip:

"The president will tweet whatever he wants. That's his way of communicating directly with the American people. Why not? So long as he can access his Twitter account because Twitter is banned in China along with Facebook and most of the other social media. I'm sure we've got the gear aboard this airplane to make it happen. But it is noteworthy that none of the major western platforms for social media are even allowed to operate in China."

Well, that settles that?

5.21pm
Folks, we now have exclusive footage of Xi and Trump's first handshake of the day:

https://v.qq.com/txp/iframe/player.html?vid=q05021qbhhf&width=500&height=375&auto=0

Pretty normal! And much better than the last one in Mar-a-Lago:

[Images via China Daily, ECNS, Twitter]

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