10 minutes to Three Hundred Tang Poems — a Qing county magistrate and his wife compiled the primer that taught a nation

Opening

A sprig of willow passed from hand to hand, the rain over Weicheng just wetting the tavern banners. This is the single most worn image in this whole anthology — have one more cup, I urge you; west of Yang Pass, there will be no old friends. For two hundred years, village schoolchildren, travelers jolting along on long cart rides, old men murmuring at their deathbeds have all done the same thing: pressed a seven-character line of Tang verse down into the throat and made it their own.

A minor county magistrate in Hebei decided the poetry anthologies being handed to children were simply not good enough. So he and his second wife shut the door and spent a year working it out between them, picking out some three hundred poems from scratch. That is how this book — the one nearly every Chinese household has opened at some point — came to exist.

What kind of book this is

Three Hundred Tang Poems was compiled by a married couple. The editor of record, Sun Zhu — styled Hengtang Tuishi — was a native of Wuxi in Jiangsu, a jinshi graduate of the Qianlong era who served as magistrate of Dacheng County, Hebei, the kind of local post that meant drafting official documents, hearing court cases, and overseeing river works all at once. His second wife, Xu Lanying, courtesy name Lixian, worked through the selections with him, sorting the poems by form; the whole project took a full year. They began compiling in the spring of the twenty-eighth year of the Qianlong reign and finished the following year. The book went out under Sun Zhu's pen name alone, and most readers since have never known Xu Lanying had any hand in it — the detail this anthology's own history erases most often.

Before it, village schools taught children from Poems of a Thousand Poets, a mixed bag chosen with no real logic. After it, Poems of a Thousand Poets all but vanished from the schoolroom. In other words: the order we now take for granted — five-character quatrains first, seven-character regulated verse next, Li Bai and Du Fu last — was laid out for us by this couple, working it out in a county-office study more than two hundred years ago.

The twin peaks of Li and Du: one flies, one sinks

Reading Li Bai and Du Fu side by side is the greatest gift this anthology leaves later readers. Both men lived through the High Tang, and each wrote it in an opposite posture.

Li Bai flies upward. Drinking alone under the moon, he makes three of himself with his shadow for company. When a friend's boat has long since vanished, he is still standing at the tower rail, watching the river run into the sky. There is no hardship in his poems, only abandon, as if nothing could ever weigh him down.

Du Fu sinks into the ground. When Chang'an fell during the An Lushan rebellion and the rebels held him there as their prisoner, what he saw was a spring in which the state lay broken while its mountains and rivers remained — five words that carry the whole poem's weight. His wife and children were far off in Fuzhou, and he pictured that night's moon over Fuzhou being watched by his wife alone. Personal hardship and a dynasty's collapse are welded into a single line here, in a way Li Bai never wrote. The first time I read those five words, I went back and read them again. They sit like lead.

Almost as soon as Three Hundred Tang Poems appeared in the Qianlong era, it pushed Poems of a Thousand Poets out of the schoolroom. In the Tongzhi era, Chen Wanjun added a supplementary commentary that is still the standard edition in use today. The saying that followed it down the generations — read three hundred Tang poems well enough and you can recite verse even if you can't write it — works as both an advertisement and a plain fact: the selection is sharp, the arrangement is clever, and the whole thing was built for a child's first lessons.

But it has stayed in print for two hundred years on more than just its usefulness as a primer. Every single poem in it can stand on its own, pulled out of the collection entirely. Grade schoolers memorize the one about lifting your head to look at the bright moon. Middle schoolers memorize the one about the state broken and its mountains and rivers remaining. By college, readers come back to those Li Shangyin lines that never quite say what they mean. There is a poem in this book waiting for every stage of a life. Most anthologies never manage that kind of staying power, no matter how hard they try.