The Complete Anthology of Tang Poetry,edited during the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), contains over 48,900 poems in 12 volumes by more than 2,200 poets. The collection provides a magnificent insight into all aspects of the social life of the period.
By the imperial edict of Emperor Kangxi (1654-1722), the voluminous work was compiled ten officials of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911), including Peng Dingqiu and Cao Yin, based on other anthologies and completed in 1705.
The Complete Anthology of Tang Poetrywas preceded by Han-style folk songs and music, then works from writers and attached biographies of the past dynasties basically according to sequence of time, and finally couplet, works about monks, Taoists, immortals, deities, ghosts, monsters, as well as dreams, banters, songs, proverb riddles, and so on. It not only included works of all famous poets in the Tang Dynasty, but also widely collected works of ordinary writers and various people, fully demonstrating the prosperity of the Tang poetry.
In the year 1982, a supplementary book to the collection, compiled by Wang Chongmin and two others, including about 1,800 odd poems, was published. From the two books alone we can read today more than 50,000 poems of the Tang Dynasty (618-907), and it is many times more than the total amount of poems produced in some thousand years before the Tang Dynasty that have been handed down. In some thousand years after Tang, in other dynasties, no poetry collections as voluminous as that of Tang were ever published either.
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