Chinese went to school 1,200 yrs ago

Beijing: Chinese archaeologists have claimed to have uncovered what is by far the country's oldest 'schoolwork', a text written in ancient Chinese characters and copied three times some 1,200 year ago.

"The text, written on the back of an official document, traces back to the Tang Dynasty (618-907), at least 1,200 years ago", said an anthropologist with Xinjiang, Normal University based in the regional capital Urumqi, Prof Zhu Yuqi.

"The text is fragmentary but some characters are legible, including the Chinese words for 'water', 'go upstream' and the name of Cen Derun, a noted poet of the Southern Dynasties (420 - 589)," Zhu said.

After they put the characters together, Zhu and his colleagues were able to translate the text into modern Chinese and found two poems, one of which was Cen's 'An Ode to the Fishes' and the other was a classic about the moon, written by an anonymous author.

The paper was unearthed in late 2004 on the outskirts of Turpan, a renowned grape production base, but did not catch anyone's attention at the time.

Ancient official documents were frequently found in Turpan, an important city in history where cultural exchanges were common between the ancient Chinese, Indian, Islamic and Greek civilisations, he added.

The scholars believe the sheet was a written assignment done by a schoolchild because Chinese schools often made students copy classics to enhance their memory and improve their calligraphy.

"On this sheet, every single character was copied three times. The text was seemingly written in Chinese ink and with a painting brush, a popular writing implement in China that was replaced by pens and pencils only after the 1900’s," Zhu said.

However, it is unusual that a paper document has been preserved for over 1,000 years. Experts guess that dry climate in this area might be a key factor to keep the paper from rotting.

The document is being kept at the Turpan City Museum and will be exhibited at an upcoming tourism festival scheduled to open on June 28, a local official said.

He said a group of experts from Beijing University and the National Library are studying the ancient 'schoolwork', hoping to unravel more mysteries such as the status of the schoolchild and why he did his assignment on the back of an official document.