Rhymed Prose - Chinese Culture

Chinese Culture

A Chinese form of elaborate rhymed prose called fu developed as the major literary form particularly associated with the Han dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). Generally, the fu type of rhymed prose describes an object, feeling, or other particular subject, using an exhaustive catalog of details and associated vocabulary, and characteristically used both rhyme and prose, variable line lengths, alliteration, onomatopoeia, and some parallelism. Topics of fu rhymed prose could vary from the exalted to the everyday: it was sometimes used to eloquently glorify the emperors; but, other topics of well-known fu included encyclopedic catalogs of minerals, types of pasta, and the species of plants a poet might expect to encounter during an exile due to political disfavor. The style of the National Anthem of the Republic of China follows that of a four-character poem (四言詩), also called a four-character rhymed prose (四言韻文), which first appeared during the Zhou Dynasty.