Editing Thousand Character Classic (section)

==History==

There are several stories of the work's origin. One says that [[Emperor Wu of Liang|Emperor Wu]] of the [[Liang dynasty]] (r. 502–549) commissioned Zhou Xingsi ({{zh|s=周兴嗣|t=周興嗣|p=Zhōu Xìngsì|first=t|links=no}}, 470–521) to compose this poem for his prince to practice [[calligraphy]]. Another says that the emperor commanded [[Wang Xizhi]], a noted calligrapher, to write out one thousand characters and give them to Zhou as a challenge to make into an ode. Another story is that the emperor commanded his princes and court officers to compose essays and ordered another minister to copy them on a thousand slips of paper, which became mixed and scrambled. Zhou was given the task of restoring these slips to their original order. He worked so intensely to finish doing so overnight that his hair turned completely white.{{sfnp|Paar|1963|p=3}}

The ''Thousand Character Classic'' is understood to be one of the most widely read texts in China in the first millennium.<ref>{{cite book |last1=Idema |first1=Wilt L. |author-link1=Elite versus Popular Literature |editor1-last=Denecke |editor1-first=Wiebke |editor2-last=Li |editor2-first=Wai-yee |editor3-last=Tian |editor3-first=Xiaofei |title=The Oxford Handbook of Classical Chinese Literature (1000 BCE-900 CE) |date=2017 |publisher=Oxford University Press |location=New York, NY |isbn=9780199356591 |page=234|chapter=Chapter 17: Elite versus Popular Literature}}</ref> The popularity of the book in the Tang dynasty is shown by the fact that there were some 32 copies found in the [[Dunhuang]] archaeological excavations. By the [[Song dynasty]], since all literate people could be assumed to have memorized the text, the order of its characters was used to put documents in sequence in the same way that alphabetical order is used in alphabetic languages.<ref>{{cite book |last = Wilkinson, Endymion |year = 2012 |title = Chinese History: A New Manual |publisher = Harvard University Asia Center| location = Cambridge, MA |isbn = 9780674067158}}, pp. 295, 601</ref>

The Buddhist [[Kingdom of Qocho|Uyghur Kingdom of Qocho]] used the thousand character classic and the [[Qieyun]] and it was written that "In Qocho city were more than fifty monasteries, all titles of which are granted by the emperors of the Tang dynasty, which keep many Buddhist texts as [[Tripitaka]], [[Tangyun]], [[Yupuan]], [[Jingyin]] etc."<ref name="Yakup2005">{{cite book|author=Abdurishid Yakup|title=The Turfan Dialect of Uyghur|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=dk12I01qTPUC&q=Turfan+chinese+speaking&pg=PA180|year=2005|publisher=Otto Harrassowitz Verlag|isbn=978-3-447-05233-7|pages=180–}}</ref>

In the dynasties following the Song, the ''[[Three Character Classic]]'', ''[[Hundred Family Surnames]]'', and ''1,000 Character Classic'' came to be known collectively as ''San Bai Qian'' (Three, Hundred, Thousand), from the first character in their titles. They were the almost universal introductory literacy texts for students, almost exclusively boys, from elite backgrounds and even for a number of ordinary villagers. Each was available in many versions, printed cheaply, and available to all since they did not become superseded. When a student had memorized all three, he could recognize and pronounce, though not necessarily write or understand the meaning of, roughly 2,000 characters (there was some duplication among the texts). Since Chinese did not use an alphabet, this was an effective, albeit time-consuming, way of giving a "crash course" in character recognition before going on to understanding texts and writing characters.{{sfnp|Rawski|1979|pp=46–48}}

During the Song dynasty, the noted neo-Confucianism scholar [[Zhu Xi]], inspired by the three classics, wrote ''Xiaoxue'' or ''Elementary Learning''{{cn|date=March 2024|reason=This work isn't mentioned in the wiki - was it inspired by these works?}}.