Taiwan folk musician Lin Shengxiang's upcoming mainland tour, The Land Is My Study, is just as likely to attract literature enthusiasts as music fans. Covering Beijing, Shanghai, Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, and Guangzhou, Guangdong province, from April 16 to 23, the tour presents a collection of Lin's songs inspired by the life and works of Zhong Lihe (1915-60), a Taiwan writer best known for his novels about southern Taiwan's farming communities.

These songs were released in 2010 on Lin's CD The Land Is My Study, which was praised by Taiwan music critic Ma Shifang as "certainly the one if there is only one album on the chart of 2010".

"Zhong is the quiet pride of Taiwan literature, and I hope to pay a tribute to him with my music, although it is a great challenge for me," Lin says.

Zhong is known to many mainlanders through the 1980 film, China My Native Land (Yuan Xiang Ren), which was adapted from Zhong's novel of the same title and featured Taiwan film star Chin Han playing the role of the author. The film's homonymic theme song by Teresa Teng was also a hit.

"The blood of a person from a native land will only stop boiling when he returns to his native land," a sentence from the novel, was cited by Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao in 2004 when speaking about the cross-Straits relationship at a press conference.

Although Zhong was only 44 when he died of pulmonary tuberculosis, he is considered to be one of the most important writers from Taiwan, and China My Native Land ranked No 37 among the top 100 Chinese novels of the 20th century, in 2008, appraised by a jury of Chinese litterateurs from across the Straits and different countries and regions of the world.

Lin has a special emotional bond with Zhong's works, because he lives in the community that Zhong depicted in his novels.

Like Zhong, Lin is a Hakka from Meinong in south Taiwan. The Bamboo Hat Hill Farm, which was used by Zhong as the title for one of his most acclaimed works, is just a 10-minute drive from Lin's home, while Zhong's wife used to live in the same village as Lin before she died a few years ago.

Lin remembers clearly when he was a child, his mother carried him and his three siblings on a motorcycle to see the film China My Native Land, in town. It was his first cinema experience, and he could recognize the sites where many of the scenes were filmed, like the fruit market and the tobacco and liquor store.