"千字文" by Xingsi Zhou is a Chinese poem composed in the sixth century. It contains exactly one thousand unique characters arranged into rhyming stanzas, created to teach children literacy. Each character appears only once in this carefully structured text. The work became one of the most widely read texts in China's first millennium, forming the foundation of traditional education alongside two other classical primers. Its thousand unique characters made it a favorite among calligraphers throughout East Asian countries for centuries.