Over at the History Hack podcast, I talk to Alexandra Churchill about my biography of Confucius, and his relevance to modern China.

Topics covered include the uses of describing his birthplace in Shandong as the “Holy Land” of China, the many topics he refused to talk about, chauvinism in the Bronze Age, and the fact that despite dynamiting his grave and desecrating his descendants’ corpses, the Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution did not turn out to be his worst enemy in the twentieth century!

We finish up by discussing the “new” bits of Confucian scripture that have turned up in recent memory, finds like Several Disciples Asked and the The Essentials, found in the 1970s, and the two “lost” chapters of The Analects, unearthed in a tomb in Nanchang in 2011.