Composition
The Thousand Character Classic is composed of 250 phrases of 4 characters each from "天地玄黃" (jyutping: tin1 dei6 jyun4 wong4, pinyin: tiān dì xuán huáng) to "焉哉乎也" (jyutping: yin1 zoi1 fu1 jaa5, pinyin: yān zāi hū yě). It was selected among the calligraphies of 王羲之 (Wang Xizhi), one of the finest calligraphers in China, and composed by Zhou Xingsi, who lived from 470 to 521 in the Liang dynasty. The characters of the poem were sometimes used to represent the numbers from 1 through 1000 (as the standard numbers could more easily be altered with an extra stroke or two), as described in this link for students: Qianziwen.
Read more about this topic: Thousand Character Classic
Famous quotes containing the word composition:
“Since body and soul are radically different from one another and belong to different worlds, the destruction of the body cannot mean the destruction of the soul, any more than a musical composition can be destroyed when the instrument is destroyed.”
—Oscar Cullman. Immortality of the Soul or Resurrection of the Dead? The Witness of the New Testament, ch. 1, Epworth Press (1958)
“The proposed Constitution ... is, in strictness, neither a national nor a federal constitution; but a composition of both.”
—James Madison (1751–1836)
“Pushkin’s composition is first of all and above all a phenomenon of style, and it is from this flowered rim that I have surveyed its seep of Arcadian country, the serpentine gleam of its imported brooks, the miniature blizzards imprisoned in round crystal, and the many-hued levels of literary parody blending in the melting distance.”
—Vladimir Nabokov (1899–1977)