President Trump was meeting on Friday with China’s leader, Xi Jinping, at a secretive Beijing compound that few outsiders ever enter.
The compound, Zhongnanhai, is a walled government headquarters where top officials from the ruling Communist Party have lived and worked since the 1950s. It is rare for China to host a foreign leader inside.
Mr. Trump did not visit Zhongnanhai during his 2017 trip to Beijing. Shen Dingli, an international relations scholar in Shanghai, said ahead of Mr. Trump’s visit on Friday that the meeting there would highlight the personal nature of his relationship with Mr. Xi.
Unlike the White House, Zhongnanhai is not accessible to the public. The most critical decisions are made there but kept from the public until leaders are ready to announce them. Residents, including Mr. Xi, enjoy exclusive privileges that have included high-end medical services and luxurious houses.
Previously, Zhongnanhai was an enclosed imperial garden, with one of its lakes dating to the 12th century. In 1898, Empress Dowager Cixi staged a coup against her nephew, Emperor Guangxu, imprisoning him on Yingtai, an artificial island in Zhongnanhai. The coup destroyed his efforts to transition the Qing dynasty to a constitutional monarchy and hastened the dynasty’s collapse.
The garden’s secluded location and symbolic connection to centralized power made it a strategic location for Mao Zedong and other Communist Party leaders, who chose it for their residences and primary offices after founding the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
In 1972, Mao invited President Richard M. Nixon to his residence inside the compound. The presidential visit ended a quarter-century diplomatic freeze between their nations and resulted in the establishment of formal relations in 1979.
Mr. Xi has hosted only a handful of foreign leaders there, including President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia and President Aleksandr G. Lukashenko of Belarus. President George W. Bush took a lakeside stroll with President Jiang Zemin in 2002. President Barack Obama’s visit in 2014 included a walk on Yingtai Island with Mr. Xi that the official Chinese news agency, Xinhua, described as one of the “defining moments in bilateral ties.”
Chinese leaders have also received American business executives at Zhongnanhai. Tim Cook, Apple’s chief executive, and Elon Musk, chief executive of Tesla, have visited multiple times.
