Taiwan Travelogue – Yang Shuangzi

In this podcast, we look at the novel that was, a little more than a week ago, awarded the International Booker Prize. Taiwan Travelogue is a novel that pretends to be a travelogue, where a Japanese woman from Nagasaki, an important writer in the Japanese empire. She travels to Taiwan to travel and talk about […]

Stephen Owen Obituary

I am sad to report that Stephen Owen, a professor at Harvard University who wrote about Chinese poetry, just passed away at the age of 79 in Massachusetts.  This short podcast talks a bit about one of the giants of the field. Here is a Chinese-language obituary that was just published.

Li Wai-yee and the Confucius Chronicles

In this podcast, I got the chance to do a face-to-face interview with Professor Li Wai-yee, a Harvard scholar who is one of the most prolific scholars of Chinese literature. During our interview, we discussed her new book, The Confucius Chronicles, just released by Columbia University Press, along with the massive role that Confucius has […]

Kublai Khan, Morris Rossabi and the 10th Anniversary of the Podcast

First off, I am dropping the podcast on the 10th Anniversary of our first episode. On April 9th, 2016, the Chinese Literature Podcast had its first episodes. The first episode of the podcast’s next decade is Morris Rossabi, the scholar who made the world rethink Kublai Khan and the Mongols. He wrote the first good […]

Du Fu – Spring Gazes – Tang Poetry Masters Series

Today, we finish up the 3 part series on Tang Poetry Masters with a look at Du Fu, China’s poet historian. The An Lushan Rebellion tore the Tang Dynasty in half and is one of the defining events of Chinese history. Du Fu is pivotal for our memory of that event, as his poems are […]

Tang Poetry Masters Series – Wang Wei and his Moment of Zen

Today, the podcast gets to Wang Wei and a Buddhist poem he wrote with the eye of a painter. Wang Wei is the least popular of the three High Tang poets, at least, since the Song Dynasty, but, back in the day, he was the most popular, more popular than Li Bai and Du Fu. […]

Tang Poetry Masters Series – Li Bai and the West

Today is the beginning of a three part series I am going to do on the three big Tang poets, Li Bai, Wang Wei and Du Fu. In this episode, we take a look at Li Bai, often considered China’s Greatest poet, and his relationship with the regions to China’s West, modern day Xinjiang and […]

Interview with Susan Wan Dolling

Today, Lee gets to chat with Susan Wan Dolling, Hong-Kong-American poet, novelist and translator. She recently published her latest book of Song poetry translations, What the Cuckoo Said, but she has long been working on translating Chinese poetry into an English that does what is hard to do, that preserves the music that you hear […]

Zoom Talk I gave on the Book for the Modern China Lecture Series

I was honored Professor Jeremy Murray invited me back to the Modern China Lecture Series to talk about my book, China’s Backstory: The History Beijing Doesn’t Want You to Read.

Return of the Rob

On this episode, I give a brief update on the book’s status, which should be in your hands by mid-November. And also, Rob returns, joining the podcast from France to talk about what he has been up to and also to chat with Lee about the book.  Transcript generated by AI  My name is Lee […]

Miss Sophie’s Diary

Finding a “first” of anything is a tricky proposition, but if we had to pick a “first” great work of feminism in modern Chinese literature, it would by Miss Sophie’s Diary, by Ding Ling, published in 1928. An absolutely fascinating work that takes full advantage of the diary format, in a way Lu Xun’s own Diary of […]

Can Xue’s Hut on a Mountain

Can Xue is one of the most famous avant-garde authors to emerge from China in the 1980’s, and we took a look at one of her best and most enigmatic short stories, “Hut on the Mountain.” http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Cao_Xues_The_Hut_on_the_Mountain_-_edited.mp3

Zhuangzi and His Fish

We here introduce one of the great duos in Chinese literary history: Zhuang Zi and his less-than-intelligent foil, Huizi. In this classic passage, the pair discuss whether it is possible to know how others feel, and on what basis one can make those kinds of assumptions. As is usual with Zhuangzi, nothing is fixed, so […]

It’s the End of the World as We Know It: Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem

How would the world’s population function if it knew the end was coming…in 400 years? What would your view of humanity be if everyone you loved had been brutally taken from you by a tyrannical regime? These are the two structuring questions for the Hugo and Nebula-award winning novel The Three-Body Problem by China’s greatest […]

Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring

Tao Yuanming’s Peach Blossom Spring is one of the most famous in all of Chinese literature. A fisherman wanders into a cave and stumbles upon a utopia, but leaves it all because he wants to tell others. Join us as we dive into the cave with Tao Yuanming. http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Peach_Blossom_-_finished.mp3

Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman

Recorded just after Halloween, this podcasts feels a little like a ghost of podcasts past for two reasons. We have recorded an episode on this story, Lu Xun’s Diary of a Madman, three times. Unfortunately, we lost the first two attempts, so we resurrected this podcast from the grave on All Soul’s Day. The second ghostly […]

Confucius

Confucius, Confucius, Confucius. What more can be said about the man who, since two and a half millinea after he lived, has defined China. In this podcast, we will focus on how a single passage, just eight characters echoes throughout Chinese literature and beyond, even into the contemporaneous Communist Party shindig happening in Beijing this […]

October Dedications: An Interview with Lucas Klein on the Poetry of Mang Ke

Back in action after a brief hiatus, Lee and Rob interview translator and professor Lucas Klein, whose most recent work, October Dedications, is a book of translations of the poet Mang Ke. Prof. Klein is best-known for his work with Xi Chuan, but gives a nice guided tour of historical trends in poetry translation, the differences […]

That’s One Weird Utopia: Kang Youwei’s “Book of Great Unity”

There were a lot of texts dealing with reform in the late Qing (1895-1911), but few of them were more radical, or more bizarre, than Kang Youwei’s Book of Great Unity (《大同书》). The venerable linguist and Confucian scholar advocated a future utopia in which not only would governments and international commerce no longer exist, but even species […]

Liberia By Way of Beijing: The Appeal of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Late Qing China

So here’s a question for you: why was one of the most popular books in the late Qing Dynasty (1895-1911) a translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin? Lee and Rob attempt to answer this question, and along the way discuss matters of representation and legal rights in America and China.   http://traffic.libsyn.com/chineseliteraturepodcast/Uncle_Toms_Cabin_-_Edited.mp3