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| You're here: Culture > First Overseas
Broadcasting Announcers |
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First
Overseas Broadcasting Announcers
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China's overseas broadcasting started
from a cave in Yan'an on December 3, 1941. On that
day, Japanese announcer Hara Kiyoko rode to the
studio on a donkey. |
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| AT 8:40pm local
time on September 11, 1947, the voice of liberated China
reached the outside world in an English-language broadcast
for the first. It came from a cave in the small village
of Shahe, nestling in the Taihang Mountains, north China.
The news read by a young pigtailed woman named Wei Lin
who is now 81. "The studio was in a doorless cave
with no proper equipment," says Ms. Wei, "and
only a kerosene lantern for lighting. Whenever we started
broadcasting, we had to hang up a coarse felt blanket
to keep out the bleating of nearby sheep". There
were no tape recorders then-the only music they could
use was a phonograph recording of the |
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Wei
Lin, the First
English Woman
Announcer |
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Triumphal March from the opera Aida. Other songs
were simply into the microphone.
Wei Lin retired in 1983, but volunteered to do part-time work
for our English Service. She can still be heard on the air occasionally
conducting the programs of Chinese Sayings and Stories and Culture
in China till 1994.
Wei has seen the rickety wartime broadcasting station evolve
into Radio Beijng (the former name of CRI) and now CRI, and
herself growing up to be a first-rate English announcer.
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Hara
Kiyoko, Back to Yan'an in 1990's |
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Former
CRI president Zhang Zhenhua greets Wei Lin at the
special ceremony for her 50 years of broadcasting.
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What
We Do
Producer:
Ding Yan 
