Classical Chinese Poetry Collection

📖 About This Tool

You remember half a line about the moon but not the poem. You need three poems on the same theme for a lesson. Searching beats leafing through an anthology. This tool arranges the commonly taught classics into a searchable library: type a few words and you get the line, the author and the whole poem.

There are four ways in. The keyword box accepts a title, an author, any line from the text, or a theme word. The dynasty, form and theme dropdowns work alone or stack, so you can ask for Tang dynasty frontier poems and nothing else. Leave the keyword empty and pick a dynasty to browse that period. Each entry carries the original text, a one-line rendering, and three labels: dynasty, form and theme.

Feihua is a separate mode. Give it a character, "moon" for instance, and it lists every poem whose text contains it, marking the hit in brackets so you can see it at once during the game. Or set nothing and press random poem for something to read.

The side panel shows the size of the library and the dynasty breakdown of the current results, with two dozen theme buttons that search on a single click. Results export to CSV for lesson material. Everything runs locally, with no network request.

The library is built in two tiers. A core set of around a thousand idioms that turn up in textbooks, exams and everyday speech is searched first, so answers are usually phrases a reader will recognise. Behind it sits a much larger pool drawn from a full idiom dictionary, used only when the core set cannot continue the chain, which keeps long chains alive instead of stopping after three or four entries.

That split shows in the statistics panel: the core count and the total candidate count are reported separately. Teachers tend to run it in same character mode for drilling, since the rule is unambiguous and easy to adjudicate; for play, same sound works better because it rarely stalls. Long chains are capped by the length you choose, and when the pool runs dry the chain simply ends early rather than looping back on itself. Nothing is sent anywhere, so it works offline once loaded.

✨ Features

• Combined search: keyword, dynasty, form and theme in any combination.
• Feihua mode: find poems containing a given character, with the hit marked.
• Random poem: nothing to set, just something to read.
• Full entry: original text, rendering, dynasty, form and theme.
• Statistics and browsing: dynasty breakdown plus two dozen theme shortcuts.
• CSV export: the whole result set as a table.

🚀 How to Use

1. Type a line, an author or a theme word into the keyword box.
2. To narrow it, pick a dynasty, form or theme; they stack.
3. Press search and the poems with their renderings appear below.
4. For feihua, put one character in the box and press find.
5. Export CSV when you want to keep the result.

⚠️ Notes

• Coverage: centred on poems commonly taught in schools, not a complete corpus; long works appear as representative passages.
• Rendering: a brief gloss of the whole poem, not a line by line commentary.
• Variants: where versions differ, the widely accepted reading is used.
• Themes: added for retrieval; a poem may belong to several at once.
• Nothing is saved: refreshing clears the query, so export in time.