What's less known is that he also took home some milk candy as a special gift from then Premier Zhou Enlai.

White Rabbit milk candy is even today a household name in China the story goes that it was Zhou's favourite snack when he worked late at night.

And it was also the secret love weapon of world champion weightlifter Zhang Guozheng, who moved his girlfriend with 20 kilograms of the candy.

White Rabbit is one of many long-standing and famous Chinese brands tied to social development and key historical events.

Yesterday, the Ministry of Commerce gave the designation of "time-honoured brand" to 430 brands around China. According to selection criteria, these brands must have been in existence before 1956 and highly popular among customers.

Worldwide, China-made textiles and home appliances enjoy great popularity and contribute greatly to the country's trade surplus because of their low price and good quality.

At home, however, old brands are struggling to gain a foothold in the domestic market, where competition from multinational giants is intensifying.

These brands have experienced hardships during their long history. After being established by a family or an individual hundreds of years earlier, most of the enterprises became State-owned in the 1950s. After decades under the planned economy, they've started to face fierce competition under the market economy.

Fang Shuying, chairwoman and general manager of Tianjin Laomeihua shoe shop, said a heritage brand is more than a product; it represents the culture of China and has deep traditional roots.

Set up in 1911, her shop first became well-known for its specially made shoes for the bound feet of Chinese women living in the era before the People's Republic of China was founded in 1949. Back then, the saying "3-inch golden lotus" described the ideal foot of Chinese women.

Many of these enterprises face various problems. Patents and intellectual property rights, for instance, are two concepts that are foreign to these long-standing brands.

Wangmazi, the most famous and long-standing brand of scissors in China after being established in 1651, went bankrupt in 2004. "We were defeated by fake and inferior Wangmazi products," a spokesman for the enterprise said.

Chairman Mao Zedong was often quoted as saying "Wangmazi, Donglaishun (the famous hotpot restaurant) and Quanjude (the famous Beijing duck restaurant) need to be preserved forever."

In 2004, however, more than 5 million fake Wangmazi scissors were found in the market, three times the output of the brand itself.

Goubuli, a famous brand of traditional baozi, based in Tianjin, faces a similar problem. Thousands of stores with the name are found nationwide, but a company spokesman said that only few of them have been authorized. The fake stores, he said, without the company's special recipe, have ruined the product's image.

As new brands emerge every day in China, traditional brands attract more middle-aged and old people rather than young people. The famous Beijing bakery Daoxiangcun has long queues in the store most of the time, but the customers are generally in their 50s or 60s. The younger generation are more frequently seen in KFC or Pizza Hut.

But some old brands are criticized for bad service and low efficiency. Tourists to Tianjin are often urged to taste the best baozi ever, but they often complain about the service at the flagship store of Goubuli. Heritage has become something they take for granted, and sometimes they become so proud of their brands that they pay little heed to customers.

Faced with competition, many brands have started to reform and build new images to attract new customers. The Flying Pigeon brand, the biggest bicycle maker in the 1980s, sold only single-gear bicycles in only one colour back then.

Now it has diversified its product range to include more than 300 models of racing and mountain bikes to meet new demands and tastes.

Some brands have flourished with new products and the courage to renovate. The sales volume of Wong Lo Kat herbal tea, for instance, is increasing by more than 40 percent each year since its canned product entered the market three years ago.

As a famous brand in southern China, the herbal tea was often sold at the market with a bowl at a cheap price. Wong Lo Kat combined the recipe with the convenience of a canned beverage.

Though each can is priced at over 3 yuan (38 U.S. cents), compared with less than 2 yuan (25 U.S. cents) for Coca-Cola, its sales volume in China is higher than Coca-Cola's, according to an official from the Guangdong Food Industry Association.

The delicate craftsmanship that made Laomeihua shoes famous in Tianjin has continued with its new target market. It now employs more than 70 workers, who make comfortable, low-priced shoes for the middle-aged and the elderly, its chairwoman Fang said.

And sometimes, tradition simply wins out. In a recent survey of Chinese women consumers, Tongrentang surpassed other pharmaceutical brands.

Founded in 1669, Tongrentang supplied medicines and prescriptions to royal families for 188 years. Today it has overcome the outdated, parochial connotations that go with being a heritage brand with new medicines and opening chain stores in shopping malls.

A spokesman for Huogongdian, a snack food shop in Changsha, Hunan Province, said it had imported more varieties of food to attract new customers. They previously had only eight kinds of food; now more than 40 are available at the shop, whose annual volume is more than 100 million yuan (12.7 million dollars).

Minister of Commerce Bo Xilai said the first group of time-honoured brands employ more than 120,000 people, and all the time-honoured brands employ more than 600,000.

The longevity of these brands, Bo said, shows that China has begun paying attention to building brands.