Category: Chinese Culture

The Qianziwen 千字文 "Thousand-characters text" is a character text book for elementary learning. There are two books with that title, namely one from theLiang period 梁 (502-557) writer Prince Xiao Zifan 萧子范, which is already lost, and one by Zhou Xingsi 周兴嗣 from the same period. The book was compiled on imperial order by using one thousand characters of the oeuvres of the famous calligrapher Wang Xizhi 王羲之 from the Eastern Jin period 东晋 (317-420). Zhou selected one thousand different, often-used characters and composed them to a long poem, of which each verse is 4 words or characters long. Each two verses rhyme, so that they are easily to remember. The words cover all aspects of nature and human life, and thus also serve to learn the most important characters of all fields, like the universe, history, self-cultivation, learning, eating and drinking, living, gardens, sacrifices, and much more.

The Quantangshi 全唐诗 is a collection of all preserved shi poems 诗 from the Tang 唐 (618-907) and Five Dynasties 五代 (907-960) periods. It was compiled in the early years of the 18th century by a team led by Cao Yin 曹寅 and Peng Dingyiu 彭定求. Some of the team members were Shen Sanceng 沈三曾, Yang Zhongna 杨中讷, Pan Conglü 潘从律, Wang Shihong 汪士纮, Xu Shuben 徐树本, Ju Dingjin 车鼎晋, Cha Sili 查嗣瑮, Wang Yi 汪绎, and Yu Mei 俞梅. The Quantangshicontains nearly 50,000 poems (including fragments) of more than 2,200 persons, arranged in 900 juan "scrolls". To each person a short biography is added.

Konghou, also called Kanhou, is an ancient plucked stringed instrument in China. There are mainly three kinds of Konghou: one is played lying flat, one is played upright and another one is the phoenix-headed Konghou.