In part three of our series, we have decided to remain resolutely apart form the world of politics by discussing a poem scrawled into the wall of an Angel Island detention cell by a Chinese scholar who was being held there.
Voltaire was such a huge fan of China that he once wrote a poem in celebration of the Qianlong Emperor, due to little else than intel that the emperor was a poet. That was enough, apparently! Who knows if Qianlong read it, but we did. Join us for part two in our series.
We’re kicking off a multi-part series on works that discuss China, or use Chinese, but are not written in China. Our first installment is Hu Chunxiang (Hồ Xuân Hương), a Vietnamese woman who wrote in Tang regulated verse during the late 18th and early 19th century.
Pu Songling knew quirky and charming, but he also knew scary, too. Take a listen to Lee and Rob discuss what is arguably the most famous story in Strange Tales from Liao Studio: a macabre exploration of monsters, Daoist magic, and a wife so dedicated that she’ll do…well, pretty much anything to save her husband.
Hogwarts before there was Hogwarts. Heck, Dorian Gray before there was Dorian Gray! Pu Songling was there first. Take a listen as Lee and Rob discuss the story of two men, a priest, and a painting that gets a little too lifelike.
Today, we have a very special guest, Antonio Leggieri on the podcast to talk about his phd research on the late imperial novel Guzhang Juechen. Listen to this fascinating discusssion as Antonio enlightens Rob and Lee on a text even they knew nothing about.
There aren’t a lot of things we agree on, but one of them is Pu Songling. The author of Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio 聊斋志异 (1740), which is exactly what it sounds like: a collection of strange tales. Very strange. Strange and wonderful. Today we start a three-part series where we dig into this […]
Song Dynasty Children’s literature + Communist propaganda + global pandemic = today’s discussion. Last week, we talked about the Three Character Classic (三字經). It is a work of probably Song Dynasty children’s literature that functioned as many young Chinese children’s first Confucian text to memorize. The book is written with three Chinese characters in each […]
The 三字經, usually translated as the Three Character Classic, is a fascinating text because it functions like a “my first Confucian text.” Children were given this text when they were quite young and asked to memorize the book, teaching them moral lessons that would prepare them to master the real Confucian classics later in life. […]
When most folks outside of China hear of the Tiananmen Square Incident, and most people either think of the massacre that occurred in 1989. But there was an earlier incident. In 1976, people were getting tired of the Cultural Revolution, but any one who stepped out of line could be criticized. Zhou Enlai, the premier […]