Neruda's last visit to China was in 1957, when he spent his birthday on a cruise sailing along the Yangtze River with Brazilian novelist Jorge Amado. Ai was the head of the Chinese delegation that guided them.

"Neruda was among the first foreign writers who visited the country after the founding of the People's Republic of China," says Zhao Zhenjiang, a prominent professor of Latin American literature at Peking University and the recipient of Neruda Presidential Medal in 2004, the year of the poet's birth centenary, for his contribution in the translation and research of Neruda's works.

"His poems are like springs flowing out of the bottom of heart, natural and artless. Chinese poets from the 1950s were heavily influenced by his works," Zhao says.

"After his visit to China, some of his poems were translated and published, and I could remember hearing students of Chinese literature at Peking University reading his poem I Wish the Woodcutter Would Wake Up out loud in the morning," recalls Zhao.

Last year, 50,000 copies of a collection of the poet's classic works, including Twenty Poems of Love and a Song of Despair, Verses of the Captain and One Hundred Sonnets of Love, were published. The number is unusually high for poetry in China, reflecting the popularity of Neruda in China even more than 40 years after his death.

"In the 1950s to '60s, Neruda was famous in China for his political poems, and later, in the '80s and '90s, his love poems were widely circulated among young Chinese," says Li Yao, editor-in-chief of Thinkingdom Media Group. The company has bought the copyright for the Chinese editions of Neruda's works.

In his memoir, Neruda wrote his judgment about China during his last visit: "The combination of vast land, extraordinary human work and gradual elimination of all injustices, will make the beautiful, extended and deep Chinese humanity flourish."

Jorge Heine, the ambassador of Chile to China, wrote for Shanghai Daily after the release of the new edition of Neruda's poems last year: "It is difficult to say what Neruda would make of today's China, but there is little doubt that at a time when China has come into its own, and Latin America has partnered with it to forge a better future, Neruda's insights into China's awakening and America's destiny, resonate."

The book was co-published by Thinkingdom and Hainan Publishing House in April with an initial run of 30,000 copies.

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