Chinese Antithetical Couplets

Introduction to Chinese Rhyming Couplets

Over three thousand years of history, from the pre-Qin elegance of the Book of Songs, through the Southern and Northern Dynasties style of the Thousand Character Classic, to the lingering echoes of the Qing dynasty in Liweng's Rhyming Couplets, books on poetry and couplets have always held an important place in Chinese culture.

As a model of parallelism and rhyme in classical Chinese poetry and couplets, Liweng's Rhyming Couplets is also a classic primer for children. Its language is elegant, its rhythms flow smoothly, and it has been passed down for more than four hundred years. Yet times have changed, and the Pingshui rhyme system it uses differs increasingly from today's Chinese Common Rhyme system. For example, the characters shi, qi, wei, er, and zhui all belong to the “Four Zhi” rhyme group in the Pingshui system. When recited in modern Mandarin, their melodious beauty is no longer easy to appreciate.

To adapt to changes in pronunciation and rhyme, Chinese Rhyming Couplets was created. Based on the latest Chinese Common Rhyme system, this book follows the latest General Rules for Couplets. It not only carries on the classics, but also incorporates modern knowledge and current affairs. Beautiful and uplifting, with lines that roll off the tongue, it is a shortcut to learning poetry and couplets, a valuable aid for researchers, and an excellent primer in prosody.

The book is built around the sixteen rhymes of the Chinese Common Rhyme system and is divided into sixteen sections, with 207 chapters in all. Each chapter includes detailed explanations, and the book contains about 280,000 Chinese characters. Every chapter covers various forms of parallelism, from single-character and two-character pairs to pairs of three through eleven characters. Each chapter uses the same rhyme from the Chinese Common Rhyme system, which is why the book is called Chinese Rhyming Couplets.

In addition, the publication of Chinese Rhyming Couplets offers poetry and couplet enthusiasts a comprehensive learning resource and provides spiritual nourishment for modern life. It can help ease stress, cultivate the mind, enrich one's inner world, and inspire readers to seek poetry and distant horizons.