Welcome to the podcast. Daodejing This is the version of the Daodejing that I use for the reading and translation. It uses simplified Chinese characters. Simplified characters arrived in China after the People's Republic of China took power in the 1950s with the aim of making written Chinese, well, simpler. This version also includes the romanized pinyin . Pinyin uses Roman characters to help Western speakers pronounce the Chinese characters. Chinese is tonal and so there a