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| The Thousand-Character Essay in Cursive Script |
| The Famous Thousand-Character Essay was composed by a scholar named Zhou in 503 A.D. in China.
In the Southern Dynasty era, the Emperor of Liang ordered an officer to randomly pick one thousand different characters from the writing of a famous calligrapher “Wang Xi Zhi”, and to use them as the paradigm for the royal family princes in the palace to learn brush writing. In order to make these one thousand characters easy to be remembered by the youngsters, the Emperor further ordered a scholar named Zhou to organize them into an essay. Zhou, a great scholar with much knowledge in about everything, turned these one thousand characters into an essay in one night. It was also said that his hair was turned all grey when he submitted the essay to the Emperor the following morning. There are exactly one thousand different Chinese characters in this essay. It was composed in 125 pairs of couplets with 4 different characters in each single couplet. The contents of the essay was so broad and diverse that it described from the changes in the universe to the farming techniques, from the way to operate a successful government to the way to maintain smooth relationship in the family, from history to philosophy, and from social science to education. This essay has been regarded as one of the most representative composition of human knowledge at that timeframe and has been used for more than a thousand years in China as a tool to teach young children reading, writing and the philosophy in life. Sharing with you this piece was written by myself many years ago following the cursive style of a famous calligrapher named “Huai Su” in the late Tang Dynasty. Please click into the image to see more details. |
| since 07/25/03 |
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