千Qiān字Zì文Wén · The Thousand Character Classic

The Qian Zi Wen (Thousand Character Classic) was composed around 535 CE by Zhou Xingsi on imperial commission — Emperor Wu of Liang wanted a calligraphy exercise for his princes using one thousand distinct characters of Wang Xizhi's brushwork, and Zhou rhymed those exact thousand characters into a 250-line poem. The constraint is absolute: no character repeats. The result is a dense, allusive sweep through cosmology, history, ethics, and rural life, and for centuries it served double duty as a calligraphy model and a first literacy text — every character a child learned was also a high-culture reference. The text is read more for its vocabulary and rhythm than for connected argument. Translation seeded from Chinasage (CC BY 3.0).