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The Essay Podcast

The Essay

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Essays from leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond.

Leading writers on arts, history, philosophy, science, religion and beyond, themed across a week - insight, opinion and intellectual surprise.

The Essay: Meanings of Mountains

The Essay: Meanings of Mountains: Episode 2: China

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Meanings of Mountains

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Episode 2: China

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Howard Zhang on the sacred mountains of China and what these mean to the Chinese today.

Howard Zhang reveals how the sacred mountains of China have inspired poets and painters for millennia. But what do they mean to the recently rich and mobile population of today?

The Meanings of Mountains is a series of essays that, following the sun's path from east to west travels from Japan to Peru, reveal the relationships that different peoples have with their mountains. In the second essay Howard Zhang of the BBC's Chinese Service, considers the way that mountains in China have been sacred to Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism - sometimes the same mountain revered by devotees of all three. Certain mountains are places of pilgrimage, the Chinese word for which literally means 'paying respect to the mountain', and many monasteries and shrines are hidden away in the hills. 

Howard explains the attraction of mountains, throughout Chinese history, to poets and artists - an attraction so deep that landscape paintings are known simply as mountain and river pictures - and intellectuals, who have been drawn from the complex life of the city to a simple, quiet life in the mountains.

But many Chinese are newly rich, able at last and eager, to travel. The holy mountains are becoming places of mass tourism. Howard Zhang contemplates this dilemma and considers the meanings of mountains to the Chinese today.

Producer: Julian May.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

Series about relationships that different peoples of the world have with their mountains

Series of essays that, following the sun's path from east to west travels from Japan to Peru, reveal the relationships that different peoples have with their mountains

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