House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has arrived in Taiwan with five of her Democratic colleagues, making her the first House leader to visit the island since then-speaker Newt Gingrich travelled there in 1997.
The US Air Force jet — a modified Boeing 737 known as a C-40B — carrying Ms Pelosi and her colleagues touched down at Taipei’s Songshan airport at 10.45 pm local time on Tuesday, following a roughly seven-hour flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. The military aircraft followed a circuitous route around the eastern coast of the Philippines and approached Taiwan from the east in order to avoid the South China Sea.
