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:
“England still waits for the supreme moment of her literature—for the great poet who shall voice her, or, better still, for the thousand little poets whose voices shall pass into our common talk.”
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“Whoever has the luck to be born a character can laugh even at death. Because a character will never die! A man will die, a writer, the instrument of creation: but what he has created will never die!”
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“For years, they have all been dying
Out, the classic buck-and-wing men”
—James Dickey (b. 1923)