Four-year-old Chen Yu-an met with visiting Chen Yunlin, chairman of Beijing's quasi-official Association for Relations Across the Taiwan Straits (ARATS), at the Grand Hotel, where Chen Yunlin is stay during his five-day historic visit to Taiwan.

Chen, then in his capacity as director of the Taiwan Affairs Office under China's State Council, was instrumental in arranging a speedy transport of Yu-an, then a seven-month-old premature infant, from an intensive care unit in a Shanghai hospital to her parents' native Taichung city in central Taiwan in December 2004.

The child was in critical condition with breathing difficulties. Because her father is a Taiwanese citizen, Yu-an is covered by the country's national health insurance program and the family decided to bring the baby back to Taiwan rather than shoulder the costs of treatment themselves in Shanghai.

The sick baby arrived in Taichung via Kinmen after making a 1,500-kilometer freeway journey from the Shanghai hospital and then taking cross-strait sea and air transport, making her the first Taiwanese patient to take advantage of the "mini three-links" channel to return to Taiwan. The channel allowed people to travel from the southern Chinese port city of Xiamen to Kinmen, without going through a third intermediary destination, such as Hong Kong.

Direct flights had not been launched between Taiwan and China at the time.

Yu-an was born on May 1, 2004 in Shanghai, just 28 weeks into the pregnancy and weighed only 900 grams at birth, as compared to the average birth weight of roughly 3 kilograms to 3.5 kilograms.

A medical group, led by the president of Li Shin Hospital in Taoyuan, northern Taiwan, arrived in Shanghai several days earlier to escort the baby, whose father is an employee of a Taiwanese computer company and whose mother is a resident of Hangzhou, Zhejiang Province.

The entire journey from Shanghai to Xiamen, Kinmen and finally to the hospital in Taichung took about 22 hours.

On Wednesday, the third day of Chen's five-day visit, Yu-an was accompanied by her father, Chen Chao-fu, and People First Party Chairman James Soong, to meet Chen.