The art of poetry must now be added to the talents of China's president, Jiang Zemin, who has published his third poem this year through the good offices of the official Chinese news agency.

Mr Jiang's latest offering was said to have been penned a few days ago while visiting Mount Huangshan - known as "the loveliest mountain of China" - in central Anhui province.

It is a modest four-line effort in classical Chinese with the title "Random thoughts on climbing Mount Huang", preceded by a few sentences describing his raptures at its lofty crags and rosy mists.

Mr Jiang writes that he "took up my dreamy pen to describe the exotic sights". As he did so, "the day broke through the rolling clouds and the sky was red for 10,000 miles".

Red clouds and very long distances also feature in a poem he wrote last month while visiting Cuba. He presented it to Fidel Castro who said it was the best gift he had ever received.

In that poem Mr Jiang spoke of "flying between red clouds/ [on] a tour of 10 days of Latin America/ covering 10,000 kilometres of distance". The last line paid a deft tribute to "the pride and strength of the [Cuban] mountain."

Like many Chinese leaders before him, from imperial to republican times, Mr Jiang was deeply moved by the sight of Huangshan.

Perhaps this sprang partly from relief at the conclusion of the meeting he chaired during his tour of Anhui province, in which local officials were asked to say what they thought of the performance of the Communist party.

He told them, in prose, that the party would "continuously improve its art of leadership and capacity of governance".

As a boy, Jiang Zemin was forced by his father to learn by heart and recite Chinese classical texts. His first published poem this year - also put out by the official news agency - was a four-line tribute to an international forum that met on Hainan island in the South China Sea.

He spoke of fresh evening breezes blowing on the boundless water, while wise people gathered from the four seas.

The last Chinese leader to publish his poems through the media was Chairman Mao Zedong, whose works are likely be remembered for rather longer.