The Book of Songs is the earliest collection of poems in China. It contains 305 poems from the early years of the Western Zhou Dynasty to the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period (about 1 1 century-6th century) (there are also six poems with titles but no content, that is, six poems with titles of Nanlang, Yougeng, respectively), which was originally called Poems, so it is also called Poems 300.
Since the Han Dynasty, Confucianism has regarded it as a classic, so it is also called the Book of Songs. The formal use of the Book of Songs should begin in the early years of the Southern Song Dynasty. Due to the separatist regime in the Spring and Autumn Period and the Warring States Period, The Book of Songs has many versions. After Qin Shihuang burned books, it was difficult to find the Book of Songs. Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty began to search for the surviving Book of Songs throughout the country. "The Book of Songs began to sprout."
Among them, the most famous version is The Book of Songs written by Han Jing's third sons Liu De and Mao Ji, so this version is also called Shi Mao.
At present, The Book of Songs of Anhui University is the earliest original. The Book of Songs is rich in content, reflecting labor and love, war and corvee, oppression and resistance, customs and marriage, ancestor worship and feasting, and even astronomical phenomena, landforms, animals and plants. It is a mirror of the social life of the Zhou Dynasty.
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The Book of Songs is China's first monograph on pure literature, which opens up the narrative and lyrical connotation of China's poems and is called "the ancestor of pure literature". It is the earliest collection of poems in China, which determines the rhetorical principles and rhyme principles of Chinese poems. It is called "the ancestor of the collection" and "the ancestor of poetry (rhyme)". It is also a representative of northern literature, yellow river basin literature and civilian literature.