The Book of Songs (Shijing) is the oldest anthology of Chinese poetry: 305 poems, with six titles preserved without text, composed between the 11th and 7th centuries BCE — from folk love songs to court odes and ritual hymns. One of the Confucian Five Classics, for two millennia it was central to elite education and memorized by generations of students, quoted as a shared moral and political language. Its poems are voiced as farmers, lovers, soldiers, and laborers, though whether they are folk songs, courtly compositions, or adapted performances — and who authored and collected them — remains disputed. It ranks among the East Asian canon's most intensively commented works.
Three thousand years ago someone stood by a river and sang about birds calling to their mates, and about a man who could not sleep for longing after a woman gathering water plants. That song became the opening poem of the Chinese classical canon. For the next two millennia, scholars insisted it was not really about love at all. It was a coded lesson, they taught, about the virtue of a queen. The Book of Songs is a collection of plain human feeling that an empire spent centuries teaching people to read as something else.