Lao Lang is one of our favorite Chinese singers, so we're delighted to have finally found a copy of this song clear enough to share with everyone. Dating back to the turn of the decade and the incipient folk rock scene in the Beijing university circuit, this song captures the romantic sentimentality of the period. In our opinion it's as good if not better than Pu Shu's fantastic Those Flowers.

If Pu Shu always flirted with more commercial pop hooks, Lao Lang veered more strongly towards poetry. And one of the particularly tricky things about this song (beyond its preference for 书面语) is the way it dances around tense with the sort of ambiguity only Chinese can manage. The first and second verses are told as a story of a long-ago romance between students forced apart as they moved out into the wider world. The third verse brings us into the present with nostalgia and regret.

As always, if you have any trouble understanding the lyrics, just click through to our text page for an annotated version with contextual and manually edited popups. And if you're visiting from outside China, please note that because of the continued blocking of Youtube by the Chinese government, we've embedded a version of the song as found on Tudou. If you're in the States and the video loads too slowly for you, you can find copies with varying degrees of fidelity on Youtube by searching for a combination of 老狼 and 恋恋风尘.