Cold Mountain Poems

HANSHAN was traditionally thought to be a resclusive seventh-century Buddhist monk who lived on a mountain in southeast China, writing his poems on rocks and trees. Current consensus is that the poems attributed to him were probably written by two or more people living in the early ninth century.

Peter Harris is a specialist in the political and cultural history of China. He is the founding Director of the Asian Studies Institute at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, and a Visiting Professor at Nanjing University, China. He has written, edited and translated numerous books on China and Asia. Other volumes he has edited for Everyman's Library include The Travels of Marco Polo, Zen Poems and Three Hundred Tang Poems.