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The ''Thousand Character Classic'' (), also known as the ''Thousand Character Text'', is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century onward. It contains exactly one thousand characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four characters apiece and grouped into four line rhyming stanzas to make it easy to memorize. It is sung in a way similar to children learning the Latin alphabet singing an "alphabet song." Along with the ''Three Character Classic'' and the ''Hundred Family Surnames'', it formed the basis of literacy training in traditional China. The first line is ''Tian di xuan huang'' () ("Heaven and Earth Dark and Yellow") and the last line, ''Yan zai hu ye'' () explains the use of the grammatical particles "yan", "zai", "hu", and "ye". ==History== There are several stories of the work's origin. One says that Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (r. 502–549) commissioned Zhou Xingsi (, 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. 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.〔, pp. 295, 601〕 In the dynasties following the Song, the ''Three Character Classic'', the ''Hundred Family Surnames'', and ''1,000 Character Classic'', came to be known 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, though time consuming, way of giving a "crash course" in character recognition before going on to understanding texts and writing characters. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Thousand Character Classic」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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