The Thousand Character Classic has been used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children since the Liang dynasty in the sixth century. It contains exactly one thousand characters, arranged into 250 lines of four-character phrases. It is also grouped into rhyming stanzas to make it easy to memorise.This book was likely printed in the late Qing period as the right column on the front cover stated that it was in accordance to the original copy approved by the Guozijian, or the Imperial Academy. The Imperial Academy was the highest institute of learning in imperial China’s traditional education system.Such books were commonly used as introductory books in Chinese-medium primary schools in Singapore before the 1920s.
