A 20-part television series, "Mao Zedong -- A Talented Poet," is expected to be broadcast later this year, to mark the 110th anniversary of the birth of the late leader of the Communist Party of China.

Mao is widely appreciated as a skillful writer of poems and more than 70 of his works have been published.

The documentary series depicts the life of Mao by explaining his poems, and the CCTV production crew undertook a six-month trek across tens of thousands of kilometers to trace Mao's footsteps.

Mao was a great revolutionary idealist and a great poet who had a life-long love for poetry and whose poems reflected his creativity, artistic nature and idealism, said Pang Xianzhi, a noted Chinese researcher on the Party history and Mao's life.

(Xinhua News Agency October 25, 2003)