Chinese Literature Podcast

Today, Lee has a fascinating interview with Professor Christopher Atwood, of the University of Pennsylvania. He studies the Mongolian and Chinese Frontier, and he recently published The Rise of the Mongols: Five Chinese Sources. Lee and Professor Atwood talk about the book and, more broadly, the early Chinese experience with the Mongols.

Sima Qian is not only the first historian in Chinese history, he is also one of the greatest writers that China has ever produced. Today, writers of Kung Fu novels point to Sima Qian's stories on fighters and assassins as the origins of the Kung Fu genre. Chinese business people point to his "Biography of the Capitalists" as the reason why Chinese people today are so good at business. He documents the Chinese colonization of the Yue, who once were an independent nation that straddled the border from Guangzhou to Hanoi.

Today is the start of a series on Sima Qian. The podcast will take a look at Sima Qian the man and the broader context of China's early historiography.

Today's podcast is Rob-less, and it looks at the 1052 poem by Wang Anshi, China's controversial economic thinker. This poem (probably) has little to do with Wang's economic policies, but is rather all about his love for his father and elder brothers and his meditation on his own mortality.

Liu Xijun was a princess. Her father and mother were executed when they rebelled against the emperor, her great uncle. Liu was sent to marry a king of the distant Wusun, a group of Central Asian herders that the emperor was trying to curry favor with. This is her poem.

The third in the series on the Book of Poems, this episode looks at the mythological poem on the birth of the god of agriculture, Lord Millet.