The San Zi Jing (Three Character Classic) is a Song-dynasty primer (c. 1270, attributed to Wang Yinglin) that packs the Confucian curriculum — basic morality, then numbers, then history, then exemplars — into rhymed lines of three characters each. For most of the imperial era it was the first text a child memorized, recited aloud before the meaning was even explained. As a result its phrasing became part of the rhythm of basic literacy: 'Men at their birth are by nature good' (人之初，性本善) is a line every Mandarin speaker knows. It is short, repetitive, and built to be chanted — closer to a nursery rhyme than a treatise — but it carries a compressed worldview, and the historical section is a real chronology of dynasties. Read it for the cultural bedrock, not for argument. Translation seeded from Herbert A. Giles (1900, public domain).