Thousand Character Classic

Thousand Character Classic （千字经） 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) made Zhou Xingsi 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".It is composed of 250 phrases of 4 characters each from "Tian Di Xuan Huang" (天地玄黃) to "Yan Zai Hu Ye" (焉哉乎也). It was selected among the calligraphies of Wang Xizhi, one of the finest calligraphers in China, and composed by Zhou Xingsi, who lived from 470 to 521 in the Liang country in the Southern Dynasty period.

The characters of the poem were sometimes used to represent the numbers from 1 through 1000 (for security against tampering/plagiarism), as described in this link for students: Qianziwen。It was also used as a primer for learning Chinese characters for many centuries in some countries, such as Korea.

[Language] Chinese