Along with the Three Character Classic and the Hundred Family Surnames, it formed the basis of traditional literacy training in the Sinosphere.

Another says that the emperor commanded Wang Xizhi, a noted calligrapher, to write out one thousand characters and give them to Zhou as a challenge to make into an ode.

Another story is that the emperor commanded his princes and court officers to compose essays and ordered another minister to copy them on a thousand slips of paper, which became mixed and scrambled.

[3] The popularity of the book in the Tang dynasty is shown by the fact that there were some 32 copies found in the Dunhuang archaeological excavations.

They were the almost universal introductory literacy texts for students, almost exclusively boys, from elite backgrounds and even for a number of ordinary villagers.

When a student had memorized all three, he could recognize and pronounce, though not necessarily write or understand the meaning of, roughly 2,000 characters (there was some duplication among the texts).

[6] During the Song dynasty, the noted neo-Confucianism scholar Zhu Xi, inspired by the three classics, wrote Xiaoxue or Elementary Learning[citation needed].

According to the Xuanhe Calligraphy Catalogue (宣和画谱), the Northern Song imperial collection included twenty-three authentic works by Sui dynasty calligrapher Zhiyong (a descendant of Wang Xizhi), fifteen of which were copies of the Thousand Character Classic.

Wani, a semi-legendary Chinese-Baekje scholar,[7] is said to have translated the Thousand Character Classic to Japanese along with 10 books of the Analects of Confucius during the reign of Emperor Ōjin (r.

The Thousand Character Classic's use as a writing primer for children began in 1583, when King Seonjo ordered Han Ho (1544–1605) to carve the text into wooden printing blocks.

The vocabulary to represent the saegim has remained unchanged in every edition, despite the natural evolution of the Korean language since then.

South Korean senior scholar, Daesan Kim Seok-jin (Korean Hangul: 대산 김석진), expressed the significance of Thousand Character Classic by contrasting the Western concrete science and the Asian metaphysics and origin-oriented thinking in which "it is the collected poems of nature of cosmos and reasons behind human life".

[9] There is a version of Thousand Character Classic that was changed to the Vietnamese lục bát (chữ Hán: 六八) verse form.

A critical text edition of the Qiānzì Wén, based upon the best manuscript and printed sources, has not yet been attempted.