Xuanzang, Chinese monk and traveller

Christine de Pizan was born in Italy but most of her life was spent in Paris, where her father was astrologer to the King of France. After her husband died she was left alone to bring up her three children. Christine's most famous work is The Book of the City of Ladies, and histo ...  Show more

After a childhood in care in Surrey, Alex Wheatle was moved to a hostel in Brixton aged fourteen. Later he was involved in the riots and given a prison sentence, events which were covered in one of the Small Axe anthology of films by Steve McQueen. But it is Wheatle's writing car ...  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