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 version also incorporates the Hundred Families’ Surnames, another classic used in Meng Xue (early learning), on a small row on top of the pages of this book.Published in Xiamen, Fujian, the cover of this book features the common nianhua (“lunar new year prints”) motif of Tian Guan (天官) with children. The publisher cleverly incorporated the name of its publishing house and location onto the scrolls, which usually holds auspicious sayings. Such books were used in Singapore to teach young children basic Chinese characters.
