Ma Baoli, a pilot from Jiangsu province.[Photo provided to China Daily]

Flying with grace

Pilot Ma Baoli of China Southern Airlines has a novel approach to poetry. You could say he takes his passion to new heights.

Traveling through the sky, he recites poems to passengers about the places they are flying over.

He was also a participant on this season's TV poetry show.

"I want to serve my passengers in more interesting ways," he says.

A graduate of Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Ma Baoli joined the Dalian branch of China Southern Airlines and was promoted to captain in 2016 at 28.

His love for Chinese ancient poems was nurtured by his father when they fished and farmed in a village in Pizhou, East China's Jiangsu province.

His father wrote down ancient poems with pencils on the four white walls of their modest village home. The wall then became Ma Baoli's "textbook of Chinese ancient poems".

"I clearly remember the first poem I learned from my father - Mooring by Maple Bridge at Night by Zhang Ji from the Tang Dynasty (618-907)," he says.

Now a successful pilot, he is regularly invited to give lectures on corporate culture to his colleagues by the company's human resources section.

"Like my father, I put a blackboard up at home to teach Chinese poems to my two children."

Ma Baoli says poetry has become part of the family's everyday lives. On one occasion he overheard his eldest child while doing her homework which was to construct a sentence using the word "while".

"My daughter told us that the sentence she made was 'My dad is making tea while reciting poems'. They were the most heartwarming words I heard," the proud father says.