Lu Kun, a thinker of the Ming Dynasty, once said: "For those who are new to social studies, those under the age of eight should first read the Three Character Classic to learn about it, read the Hundred Family Names for daily use, and read the Thousand Character Script to understand the righteousness." ”

During the Southern and Northern Dynasties, Emperor Wudi of Liang sent people to select 1000,<> non-repetitive Chinese characters from Wang Xizhi's calligraphy works, and then ordered the scattered horse attendant Zhou Xingsi to compile a text, which is called "Thousand Character Text".

As a "high-level reader" among the three major children's books in ancient China, the four characters in the format of "Thousand Character Text" are one sentence, covering astronomy, geography, society, history, human ethics and other aspects of knowledge.

It was born in the 6th century AD, but it has been translated into several languages throughout history and widely spread among various ethnic groups. So far, Western Xia, Uighur, Tibetan, Manchu and other versions of the Thousand Characters have been discovered. With so many versions of its popularity, we can imagine how popular the "Thousand Character Text" was in ancient China.

Xixia people imitate "Thousand Character Text"

From 1038 to 1227, the Dangxiang established the Western Xia regime in the Hexi area. Li Yuanhao ordered the minister Ye Li Renrong to create the Western Xia script based on Chinese characters, and then in order to promote the new script, he published a large number of documents, using Western Xia to translate a large number of Buddhist classics and Chinese classics such as the Analects, Mencius, the Book of Filial Piety, and the Zhenguan Political Figures, etc., including the "Pearl in the Palm of the Palm of the Fan-Han Combination" for learning the bilingual use of Fan-Han.

Later, Xixia modeled on the "Thousand Character Text" to compile the character book "Broken Gold", the full name of which is "Xinji Broken Gold Palm Wen", which compiled 1000,200 non-repetitive Western Xia texts into 100 sentences and <> quintuple poems, the whole poems were completed in one go, there were no obvious chapters in the middle, the content was rich, and the arrangement method and the order of narrative listing were obviously influenced by the "Thousand Character Text".

In 1909, two manuscripts of "Broken Gold" were unearthed at the site of Blackwater City, but unfortunately they were hijacked by Russian expeditions to St. Petersburg, and are now in the Institute of Oriental Literature of the Russian Academy of Sciences. In 1999, a fragment of "Broken Gold" unearthed in the Mogao Grottoes of Dunhuang, in italics.

It is worth mentioning that the Western Xia Tripitaka imitates the Chinese Tripitaka "method of arranging Buddhist scriptures" and retains the tradition of marking the Thousand Character Scriptures with the number of the Thousand Characters, that is, the characters "Heaven, Earth, Xuan, and Yellow" are marked under the titles of each 10 scriptures.

A rich and immature Uighur translation

There are as many as 12 known fragments of the Uighur "Thousand Characters", involving 4 manuscript texts, which are collected in Berlin, St. Petersburg and other places. From the 8th to the 15th century, as a nomadic people, the Uighurs were mainly active in the Mongolian Plateau in northern Mobei, the Hexi Corridor, Turpan and other places, using the Uighur script. After the collapse of the Mobei Uighur Khanate in 840, some of the Uighur tribesmen moved west to the Turpan Basin and established the Gaochang Uighurs, where they came into contact with many Chinese texts and translated a large number of Buddhist scriptures from Chinese.

The "Thousand Character Text" is widely spread in the Turpan area, and the Chinese "Thousand Character Text" was unearthed in a local Tang tomb, which is probably a student character book. A fragment of a Chinese manuscript unearthed in the old city of Jiaohe in Turpan, the epilogue records: In the thirteenth year of the Tianxi year, Xin Wei, a Uighur named Shengquan Dutong in Jiaohe read the "Thousand Character Text".

The translators of the Thousand Character Script adopt a combination of literal translation, paraphrasing and transliteration, and even write Chinese characters directly in the Uighur text for the convenience of readers, trying their best to restore the style and original meaning of the Chinese Thousand Character Text.

In the face of the broad and profound semantic connotation of Chinese, it is inevitable that the translator will make mistakes, such as when translating the sentence "Wei Dan Ying", the ancient meaning of the word "Wei" means "if not", but the translator understands it as "small", this kind of unbearable mistake occasionally occurs.

The Thousand Characters Phonetic in Tibetan Alphabet

There are more than 140 miscellaneous "Thousand Character Texts" produced by the Dunhuang Tibetan Scripture Cave, including a unique document, which is appended with Tibetan pronunciation on the left side of Chinese characters, which scholars call the Chinese-Tibetan countertone "Thousand Character Text", reflecting the depth of language and cultural learning and exchanges between Tibet and Chinese.

This fragment begins with "Yong Yi Yong" and ends with "Wandering Zhan Zhan", with 53 lines of 13 characters each, all but two lines are complete, the rest are incomplete, and lines 2-44 are accompanied by Tibetan countertones.

Scholars speculate that it was written in the early 11th century, when the Tubo people occupied Longyou and Dunhuang, and the phonetic on it should be recorded in Tibetan by the Tibetan-speaking Tubo people in order to facilitate the recitation of Chinese characters. If we try to simulate a set of Tibetan pairs with letters, we can find that "husband singing wife" is pronounced "pu qon bu sui", which is exactly in line with the pronunciation characteristics of the northwestern sound of the Tang Dynasty, and the couple pronounced "pu bu", indicating that the local ancients at that time did not pronounce the sound "f", but correspondingly pronounced b or p, which is why the "room" of "A Fang Palace" is pronounced as "pang".

Full text with neat content and slender font

The rulers of the Qing Dynasty were very respectful of Confucianism and Taoism, not only publishing a large number of Chinese texts and history books, but also setting up a special study room to translate Chinese classics into Manchu and engrave and circulate. During the Kangxi Dynasty, You Zhen, the editor of the Hanlin Academy, wrote the Manchu text "Thousand Character Text".

Compared with other translations, the content of this document is quite complete, there is no Chinese contrast, the font is slender and beautiful, and it is quite beautiful. Its significance of the 1,000-character book is very suitable for literacy education, which has effectively promoted the spread of traditional Chinese culture represented by Confucianism among the people.

The Manchu text "Thousand Character Text" was later collected at Waseda University in Japan, and appears in the opening chapter of the document "Thousand Character Texts of the Sages of the Past Pilgrimages".

In 1907, the Zhenbei Lithograph Museum in Beijing printed the "New Translation of Mongolian and Han Thousand Characters", which belongs to the combination of Mongolian and Chinese, and marks the sound of Chinese characters in Manchu, which was later included in the "Collection of Mongolian Enlightenment Reading Materials in the Qing Dynasty (All 2 Volumes)".

[The above content is the personal opinion of experts and does not represent the position of this platform.] 】

About the author:

Chen Hui is an associate researcher at the Ethnic Cadre Education Research Center of the Central Ethnic Cadres College.

(Source: Daozhong WeChat public account)