This week, Rob and I are travelling, so we have decided to go back into the vault and dig up one of our first podcasts ever...the sound quality is bad, our explanations are even worse...but the story is great. A man falls in love with a very young boy and things take off from there. This story has everything: an execution, a castration and a spontaneously-growing vagina.
Did you know writing a poem could get you exiled? Well, it could and it did, in Su Dongpo's case. Join us in our ongoing accidental series on Song Dynasty poetry!
This is part of our accidental series on the Song, and this is also our second episode on the poetry of Wang Anshi (王安石). Today, we look at a ballad that Wang wrote upon the death of his wife and continue our debate about the merits of Wang.
This week, we decide, in the middle of doing the podcast, that the Song has so much interesting stuff going on during it that we have to make this series into a longer series. Today, we are going to tackle a single poem by Su Dongpo. The poem we are looking at is Su's "Waking up on a Boat at Night."
This week, we explore Jing Tsu's fascinating exploration of the history of language in her book Sound and Script in Chinese Diaspora.