Update: Water Margin Podcast Launch; Three Kingdoms Miscellany

An announcement about my new podcast project, and an update on a couple things I’ve been doing with the Three Kingdoms Podcast.

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• Transcript
• Water Margin Podcast website
• Internet Archive collection of the Three Kingdoms Podcast audio files
• The Three Kingdoms-themed marble panels at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology

Transcript

Hey everyone. Happy New Year! Welcome to 2019, and I just want to drop a short update on this feed to let you know what I’ve been up to since the podcast concluded last summer.

So first of all, as many of you already know, I just launched my next project, the Water Margin Podcast, where we are essentially doing the same thing we did on this podcast, but with the novel The Water Margin, which is also often referred to as Outlaws of the Marsh. So if you haven’t yet, go check out that new podcast at outlawsofthemarsh.com. It’s also already on iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, and the other major podcast platforms.

Before I got all wrapped up in launching that podcast, I spent the past six months or so ensuring that my work on the Three Kingdoms Podcast will survive should something calamitous happen to this website. One of the things I’ve done is to upload all the audio files to the Internet Archive, which is about as permanent as something on the Internet can be. I’ve included a link to that collection with the notes for this update on the website, so check it out there if you want. You’ll notice that the order of the files are kind of scrambled. Reordering things on the Internet Archive is apparently a huge pain, so I was only able to make partial progress on that before having to shift my attention to the Water Margin Podcast.

Another thing I’ve been doing is going back and re-recording some of the earlier episodes of the Three Kingdoms Podcast to improve their quality. I’ve done this for just the first three episodes so far, but my plan is to do one or two here and there going forward. Of course, now that I’m immersed in producing the Water Margin Podcast, that work will be pretty sporadic.

Finally, I want to mention a neat little discovery I made. Last spring, someone at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at Berkeley reached out to me. They have in their collections a set of five marble panels that were carved sometime in the mid-1700s. They came from an old Buddhist temple in Shanxi Province in China. The carvings depicted various scenes from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and the museum was looking to compile more information about those scenes so that it would be on file for any researchers who might be interested. I was, of course, happy to contribute. So I sent them some information about each of the scenes. These panels are on public display at the museum. The museum is closed right now while they install a new exhibit, but I’m told they’ll reopen in March. So if you’re in the Berkeley area, consider dropping by to check them out. They’re pretty neat. I’ve included a link to pictures of the panels in the show notes.

Alright, so that’s about it for this update. Again, make sure to check out the Water Margin Podcast at outlawsofthemarsh.com. That show is on iTunes, Stitcher, YouTube, and pretty much wherever you get podcasts, so subscribe to it, listen to it, rate it, review it, and send me comments to let me know what you think. Thanks, as always, for your continuing support of these projects, and happy New Year!