Xuanzang, Chinese monk and traveller

"Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale her infinite variety." She's the most famous character in antiquity, made more famous by Shakespeare and Hollywood films. But this Cleopatra is not the one Kate Williams has come to nominate. She wants to move from the cliches and reclaim ...  Show more

Ade Edmondson - star of The Young Ones, The Comic Strip Presents, Bottom and much more besides - chooses the singer Sandy Denny. "I think a large part of my Englishness comes from Sandy Denny," he says of the singer perhaps best known for her work with Fairport Convention. The pr ...  Show more

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the great novels of China’s Ming era, and perhaps the most loved. Written in 1592, it draws on the celebrated travels of a real monk from China to India a thousand years before, and on a thousand years of retellings of that story, especially ...  Show more

In China during the Tang dynasty, a humble monk named Xuanzang had a great destiny. His life and travels would be mythologized in the hugely popular novel Xiyouji, known in English as Journey to the West. In today’s story, Xuanzang learns where he came from, and risks death to re ...  Show more

In the winter of 770 the Chinese poet Du Fu wrote his final words, ‘Excitement gone, now nothing troubles me…/ Rushing madly at last where do I go?’ Looking back at his life and work, the historian Michael Wood retraces Du Fu’s journeys across China. He lived through war and f ...

Alan Wilson Watts (6 January 1915 – 16 November 1973) was an English writer, speaker and self-styled "philosophical entertainer", known for interpreting and popularising Japanese, Chinese and Indian traditions of Buddhist, Taoist, and Hindu philosophy for a Western audience. Born ...  Show more