19 different translations of a single short Tang Dynasty poem adds up to a guided tour of the rich and peculiar ways other cultures interact with Chinese poetry. Join us as we discuss a wonderful book!
Greek philosophy has the dialogues of Plato. Chinese philosophy has those of Mencius. As one half of the “Kong-Meng” 孔孟 duo (Confucius and Mencius), Mencius was more responsible than perhaps anyone in history for the spread of a kind of thought that later generations would call Confucianism. In this podcast, we talk about a famous […]
Man drinks with his buddies. Man upgrades and becomes drinking buddies with one of the grand poobahs of the underworld. Man dies. Man becomes high-ranking bureaucrat in the afterlife. Man becomes more present and caring father and husband from his place in the underworld. That kind of thing happens every day, right? It does in […]
Look, no matter how law-abiding we all are, there’s always that part of us that wishes we didn’t have to be, and just about every culture has its stories that celebrate that. Robin Hood, anyone? How about Ocean’s 11 and its sequels? China has its own long history of outlaw stories, and we talk about […]
The multi-volume Records of the Grand Historian, by Sima Qian, is one of the masterworks of Chinese history and literature . Even today it is the only source for much of our information on pre-Han (206 B.C.E.) China. One of the classic stories from the collection is The Biography of Xiang Yu (《项羽本纪》). Lee and I […]
The Tribute of Yu (禹貢) is one of the oldest mythological texts related to Chinese statehood. Yu was a semi-mythical god-king who traveled around the nine states noting what each of these states had that was worth giving as tribute to the emperor. The text is almost certainly not as old as it purports to […]
Have you ever heard about China’s intense exam culture? Much like its East Asian counterparts, China both loves and loves to hates its exam system. The most infamous, the Gaokao, determines the testtaker’s college choice, and even major in some cases. What if we told you that this exam culture had more than a thousand […]