People

By Kathleen Brady

What was that about "uneasy lies the head that wears a crown"? Listen to the latest cares of that veteran traveler, Queen Elizabeth II, 60. She had dreamed for years of visiting China, and now that Britain has agreed to return Hong Kong to the People's Republic in 1997, the royal progress began last week. In Peking she reviewed an honor guard of the People's Liberation Army and enthusiastically joined the tourist crowds in the Forbidden City. Her hosts were so delighted with her that chain-smoking Leader Deng Xiaoping, 82, refrained from puffing during their two-hour lunch, and people along the route, which included Shanghai, Kunming and Canton, gave her the largest reception yet of any foreign trip during her 34-year reign. Trouble was someone forgot to keep her husband Prince Philip, 65, amused. Known as a man with a short fuse and a tart tongue, he saw some students from the University of Edinburgh at a museum in Xi'an. "If you stay here much longer, you will go back with slitty eyes," quipped the royal consort, who went on to call Peking "ghastly" before his wife, in the words of a student, "tried to calm him down." Later, after the incident made the front pages back home, Philip had a final word for the students: "Rather tactless."