Every evening, families gathered around the radio to tune in Yuan Kuocheng's Pingshu broadcast. However, the famous storyteller died of heart failure today, at the age of 86, in Beijing.
Born in 1929 in Tianjin, Yuan started his career as a Pingshu artist when he was just 14 years old, but went on to establish himself in the world of Pingshu, or traditional Chinese storytelling.
Yuan's Pingshu version of the classic Chinese tales, "Journey to The West" and "Three Kingdoms" are very familiar. He is one of the four most renowned Pingshu artists in the country, with the others being Liu Lanfang, Shan Tianfang and Tian Lianyuan.
