BBC Documentaries

Du Fu: China's Greatest Poet (2020x64)

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Michael Wood travels in the footsteps of the eighth-century poet, from the Yellow River to the Yangtze Gorges and down to the forested hills of Hunan. Born in 712, the age of Beowulf in Britain, Du Fu lived through the violent fall of China's Tang dynasty, and as rebel armies sacked the capital and floods and famine wrecked the country, he was forced to flee, taking his family on the roads as refugees. With readings by Sir Ian McKellen.