I. Introduction to Qian
Qian Zi Wen is a rhyming style composed of 1000 Chinese characters compiled by Zhou Xingsi, assistant minister of Liang Dynasty in the Southern and Northern Dynasties (before Sui and Tang Dynasties, words that didn't rhyme or contradict were called "pen" instead of "text").
Liang Wudi (502-549) ordered people to select 65,438+0,000 non-repetitive Chinese characters from Wang Xizhi's calligraphy works, and ordered Zhou Xingsi, an assistant minister riding a horse outside Yuan Dynasty, to compile them. The full text consists of four sentences, which are neat, clear and brilliant.
Qian Wen Zi is an influential children's enlightenment book in China. It has simple sentences and is easy to recite and remember, and has been translated into English, French, Latin and Italian. After simplifying Chinese characters and merging variant characters in Chinese mainland, there are more than 990 different Chinese characters left in the simplified Chinese version.
Second, the creative background
Literacy textbooks specially used for enlightenment have appeared in China for a long time. There were Cang Xie and Gui Li in the Qin Dynasty, Fan Jiang in Sima Xiangru, Gu Xi in Jia's family, exhortation in Cai Yong and urgent chapter in You's family in the Han Dynasty, and Three Kingdoms in the Three Kingdoms period.
Among these works, only Urgent Chapter has an influence on later generations, and the rest have little influence. Although Urgent Chapter is a prominent primary school book after Cang Xie Pian, due to various problems in its circulation, its authority was not as good as before in the Southern and Northern Dynasties.
However, during this period, Gu Ting, Yi You and other enlightening books appeared, and their readability was limited. It is against this background that thousands of words came out.
In the Southern Dynasties, in order to teach Wang Xizhi calligraphy, Yin was asked to carve a thousand different words from Wang Xizhi's works, each with a piece of paper, and then these messy rubbings were given to him to weave them into rhymes with content. This is the Thousand-Character Works, which was circulated in 2 1 century for more than 400 years.
Related influence
I. China
Qian Wen Zi is an early textbook of China, covering astronomy, geography, nature, society and history. It is the best reading material for enlightening children, and it is also a vivid and excellent encyclopedia.
The spread of Qian 1400 years shows that it is not only a widely circulated children's book, but also an integral part of China's traditional culture.
Second, Japan.
There are not only many versions of Chinese characters in Japan, but also many works with different contents in the name of Chinese characters. Thousands of words are used to learn Chinese characters and practice calligraphy.
Nanhexi, a famous Japanese female calligrapher, once wrote with admiration: "If a person who lived 1500 years ago wrote 250 idioms in 1000 different Chinese characters in a short night, you would be amazed."
The person mentioned by Nanhexi is Zhou Xingsi in Liang Wudi period of China's Southern Dynasties 1500 years ago, and these 250 "four-character idioms" are "thousands of words".