A collection of thirty-five poems spanning nineteen centuries, representing both famous and lesser-known poets, including both the Chinese text and a literal translation.

"Composed of 184 prose passages and 5,263 lines of verse to be narrated and sung by a performing singer-storyteller, Master Tung's Western Chamber Romance is an elaboration of the T'ang dynasty love story, The Story of Ying-ying, by Yuan Chen (779-831). But unlike the T'ang story, in which the lovers fail to marry each other, Master Tang's Western Chamber Romance ends with their wedding."--Cover.

Translator and independent scholar Bill Porter, also known by his Chinese name, Red Pine, takes a fast-paced pilgrimage to China during which he pays homage to dozens of China's greatest poets by visiting their graves, or trying to, and performing idiosynchractic rituals with small cups of Kentucky whiskey. Includes biographical informaton, history, travel writings, over 200 classical poems in Chinese with English translations, and over 100 photographs....

"After a failed push for political reform, the T'ang era's greatest prose-writer, Liu Tsung-yuan, was exiled to the southern reaches of China. Thousands of miles from home and freed from the strictures of court bureaucracy, he turned his gaze inward and chronicled his estrangement in poems. Liu's fame as a prose writer, however, overshadowed his accomplishment as a poet. Three hundred years after Liu died, the poet Su Tung-p'o ranked him as one of...