Title
The Thousand Character Classic with explanations (千字文句释) by Da Xin Shu Ju (大新书局)
Year/Period
Late Qing - early Republican period
Region
Hong Kong and Singapore
Object Type
Material
Technique
Dimension
Object size: 20.7 x 13.4 x 0.2 cm
Accession No.
2021-00325
Collection of
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 particular book has explanations in vernacular Chinese and interestingly advertised its use of movable typesets(活版) for printing instead of the usual woodblock print on its front cover.
