The Book of Songs
Three hundred and five poems, many of them by and about ordinary people.
- When
- —
- Duration
- 400 years
- Known to
- ± 100 years
- Era
- Iron Age, Holocene
The Shijing collects folk songs, court pieces and ritual hymns from roughly 1000 to 600 BCE, including complaints about conscription, courtship, harvest and taxation. Confucius is said to have selected the anthology and told his son that without studying it he would have nothing to say. It becomes one of the Five Classics, memorised by every educated Chinese person for two thousand years, and quoting it appropriately becomes a mark of cultivation.