Ling U

The grand finale of The How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast Program was successfully held at Boston Time 8:00 PM on February 25 / Hong Kong Time 9:00 AM on February 26, 2023. Thirteen guest hosts from USA, Canada, Singapore and Hong Kong attended this online meeting hosted by Prof. Zong-qi Cai, host and producer of this podcast program.

Prof. Cai began this event by showing a slide that presents a brief bio of each topic host, along with the topic poster. Next, the guest hosts took turns to talk about fun and memorable things about how they fell in love with Chinese poetry, the gratification and pleasures they derive from learning and teaching poetry, and/or from making the podcast. After everyone had spoken, Prof. Cai played an 8-minute demo of the “video-fication” of a podcast episode and discussed the approach to turning these podcast talks into video episodes. This video-fication project arouse great interests of the guest hosts and audiences.

The How to Read Chinese Poetry Podcast and Videos presents the highlights of the acclaimed book How to Read Chinese Poetry: A Guided Anthology by Columbia University Press. The podcast/videos consist of 55 episodes, where a team of leading experts guides listeners to explore the rich heritage of Chinese poetry, poem by poem, genre by genre, and dynasty by dynasty. The last episode was released on February 28, 2023.

The primary audience of this podcast/videos is general public in the English-speaking world. As of 12:30 PM on Feb. 28, 2023, the 54 podcast episodes have scored a total of 121708 plays. The audiences come from 81 countries and regions.