Well versed

After two failed attempts at the competition final, Peng Min has finally conquered CCTV's Chinese Poetry Conference, rounding off a stellar collection of culturally-themed television championship titles.

The winner of the fifth season of the China Central Television's Chinese Poetry Conference was unveiled on Feb 9. Peng Min, who has fallen at the final hurdle twice before, finally claimed the crown for himself.

The show gathers enthusiasts of ancient Chinese poems who have to tap into their knowledge of the art form to compete against one another in a series of puzzles and quizzes. These included a round where contestants had to guess the stanzas of poems based on pictures painted on the spot by one of the judges.

Another challenge saw competitors, given a word, face off against each other by having to recite the stanza of a poem with that word in－going back and forth like a tennis rally with words.

The competitors vary in age, from teenage students to professional adults. Peng, 36, an associate senior editor of a poetry magazine, is one of the most familiar faces and most competitive participants of the show. He can recite around 1,000 poems.

With a master's degree in literature, Peng is always the hot favorite to win the trophy, but, surprisingly, he's lost two finals in a row－the second season he lost to a 16-year-old high school student, Wu Yishu, and in the third season he was beaten by deliveryman Lei Haiwei.

He cried after losing the season three final, prompting a lot of hurtful abuse and mockery online, which he wisely chose to ignore. The pain of the previous two losses meant that he skipped the fourth season of the show.

"I eventually realized that if I compete and fail again, at least I've tried, but if I don't sign up, that means I'm more of a failure because I'm afraid of trying. Therefore, when season five came around, I decided to give it another go," Peng recalls. He admits that he was already considering whether or not he would join for season six if he failed to win this time around.

The season five final came down to Peng and 11-year-old Han Yaxuan－again he was facing a much younger rival. This time, though, there was to be no mistake and victory was finally his.

"I want to tell people who have a similar experience that, even though you go through all kinds of misfortune or difficulties, as long as you are brave enough to look up, there will always be a light in the sky to guide you out of the darkness," Peng said in his acceptance speech.

"Thousands of years later, all of our shadows will have vanished, only the beauty of poems will last."