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:
“A thousand moral paintings I can show
That shall demonstrate these quick blows of Fortune’s
More pregnantly than words.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“PLAIN SUPERFICIALITY is the character of a speech, in which any two points being taken, the speaker is found to lie wholly with regard to those two points.”
—Lewis Carroll [Charles Lutwidge Dodgson] (1832–1898)
“The detective novel is the art-for-art’s-sake of our yawning Philistinism, the classic example of a specialized form of art removed from contact with the life it pretends to build on.”
—V.S. (Victor Sawdon)