206 Kite

Do you like to fly kites? Tony Curzon Price is not just an economist and writer but is also the inventor of a special kind of kite-board. He and ShaoLan discuss the history of kites, who invented them around 2400 years ago in ancient China, the military application for kites at the time as well as the philosophies of the inventor himself! Tony’s own invention is a way of trying to bring the fluidity of kite surfing onto land, do you think it sounds difficult?

In Chinese, the word for “kite” is 風箏/风筝. The first character 風/风 means “wind” and the second character 箏/筝 is a kind of Chinese harp, so put together, the words conjure an image of an “instrument” with many strings, that flies in the wind 風箏/风筝.