Cultural connection vital amid coronavirus lockdown, says Du Fu documentary creator

"Labour of love"

It was also in Manchester where Wood started his love with Du Fu's poem, when he was a teenage school boy.

He recalled that he found in the bookshop a nice series of translations of world literature and one of these was the poetry of the late Tang Dynasty. "The moment I read the words of the book, I was really hooked. This was a world I didn't know anything about, a world I never imagined existed. It was of such fabulous richness and since then these poems stayed with me."

To this reason, after having produced more than 120 history documentaries, Wood called the Du Fu documentary his "labour of love".

In the film, Wood not only uses "the greatest" to describe Du Fu, but also puts him in the same literary league as Dante and Shakespeare.

But the professor pointed out that the impact of Du Fu goes far beyond as a "poet".

"To call him poet is to underplay his importance in Chinese literature, because it limits his standing simply to that of a poet. There is no comparable figure in Western culture, someone by chance, came to embody not only the feelings but the moral sensibility of a whole civilization," the presenter said in the film.

He told Xinhua that during the filming in China last September he was impressed by ordinary Chinese people's enthusiasm to the poet and his poems.

"You see that the ancient culture has not been lost at all. The riches of the culture survived," he said.

To better present the poetry to western audience, he invited British actor Ian McKellen, who played Gandalf in the Lord of the Rings, to read in English 15 poems and articles translated from Du Fu.

Wood remembered that he sent some poems of Du Fu to McKellen and he replied "almost immediately" by email saying "these are just wonderful and I really want to do".

As an accomplished television historian, Wood already produced other China-related documentaries, such as The Story of China, released in 2016, and in 2018 The Story of China's Reform and Opening Up.

And he won't stop the search for Chinese culture and history. He said he is very interested in the first British diplomatic mission to China in 1793 by George Macartney.

"I'm quite interested in doing a film which looks at that first moment of Anglo-Chinese diplomacy and seeing what we could draw from that. But it's just a little idea so far. We'll see."