Well, after 5 months of effort - mostly on the part of our Chinese readers - the LibriVox project to record an audiobook of Three Hundred Tang Poems, Volume 1 唐诗三百首，卷一 is complete.

See the LibriVox catalogue page for this project.

Recordings are in Cantonese, Mandarin, Hokkien and Taiwanese. Each recording is an individual mp3 file, so they can be linked to individually.

We're working on Volume 2, and welcome any volunteers who can help!

Continuing the 'back to China' theme, I came across a great site for things Chinese. Unlike many, this is well designed and has good quality content on a range of topics - from literature and dictionaries, through to galleries, city profiles... you name it. I found a number of resources I'd been looking for, as possible future LibriVox projects.

mychinastart.com

Enjoy!

Archie Barnes taught classical Chinese at Durham University, and was hugely inspirational to us young sprogs as we tried to get to grips with Mencius, Wang Wei and the like. I'm not sure my dissertation on the use of 德 in the Analects of Confucius was quite up to the great man's standards (in fact, I didn't dare ask my tutors what they thought of it, for fear it was lamentable), but it was the sort of direction he steered us towards.

In his retirement, he wrote Chinese through Poetry: An Introduction to the Language and Imagery of Traditional Verse. This is now available to download at www.archiebarnes.com, thanks to Marie and Archie's family.

From a Japanese perspective, anyone struggling to reach an appreciation of kanji should give this a try. Without needing to 'learn' Chinese, you will see the richness of the tradition of which kanji are a part.

Needless to say, those with an interest in classical Chinese or Chinese poetry will find this invaluable.