The Thousand Character Classic (千字文) is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. It contains exactly one thousand unique characters. It is said that Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (r. 502-549) commissioned 周興嗣 (pinyin: Zhou Xingsi, jyutping: Zau1 Hing3 Zi6) to compose this poem for his prince to practice calligraphy. The original title of the poem was 《次韻王羲之書千字》 and it is sung in the same way in which children learning Latin alphabet writing do with the "alphabet song".
Read more about Thousand Character Classic: Composition, Japan, Korea, Manchu Texts
Famous quotes containing the words thousand, character and/or classic:
“No flower blooms for a thousand days.”
—Chinese proverb.
“There is no character, howsoever good and fine, but it can be destroyed by ridicule, howsoever poor and witless. Observe the ass, for instance: his character is about perfect, he is the choicest spirit among all the humbler animals, yet see what ridicule has brought him to. Instead of feeling complimented when we are called an ass, we are left in doubt.”
—Mark Twain [Samuel Langhorne Clemens] (1835–1910)
“That age will be rich indeed when those relics which we call Classics, and the still older and more than classic but even less known Scriptures of the nations, shall have still further accumulated, when the Vaticans shall be filled with Vedas and Zendavestas and Bibles, with Homers and Dantes and Shakespeares, and all the centuries to come shall have successively deposited their trophies in the forum of the world. By such a pile we may hope to scale heaven at last.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)