Classical Chinese poetry line search. Type a famous line, phrase, author, or title fragment to search 500+ poems from 唐詩三百首 + 千家詩; matches are highlighted with author, dynasty, and the full poem. Script-agnostic (簡/繁) search. Cultural reference.
Chinese Poetry Line Search (詩詞名句)
Text data: chinese-poetry (MIT licence, © 2016 JackeyGao). We corrected its Simplified-to-Traditional conversion errors against Wikisource and merged the 28 poems that appear in both anthologies.
How to use
Type a line, phrase, author, or title
Enter any fragment in the search box — half a line you remember (e.g. 白日依山盡), a single word (e.g. 明月), an author (e.g. 李白), or a title (e.g. 靜夜思). No need to type a whole line.
Script-agnostic matching
The poems are stored in Traditional characters. Before comparing, the tool writes your query and every line of every poem the same way, with punctuation removed, so Simplified, Traditional, and the two Traditional spellings of characters such as 為/爲 and 裡/裏 all find the poem. Matched text is highlighted.
Read the full poem + source
Each hit is a card showing the title, author, dynasty, and the complete poem. Exact whole-line matches rank first; partial matches follow.
Display follows the interface language
Traditional and English interfaces keep the Traditional original; the Simplified interface auto-converts the displayed poem to Simplified (via OpenCC). Everything runs locally in your browser.
Classical Poetry Line Search: From Half a Memory Back to the Whole Poem
Almost everyone carries a few lines of poetry in their head — "床前明月光" (Before my bed, the bright moonlight), "欲窮千里目,更上一層樓" (To see a thousand miles, climb one more storey) — yet can't recall which poem they came from, who wrote them, or in which dynasty. This tool is built for exactly that "find-the-poem-from-the-line" need. Type any fragment you remember and it searches across 500+ classics from the 唐詩三百首 (Three Hundred Tang Poems) and 千家詩 (Poems of a Thousand Masters), surfaces every poem containing your fragment, highlights the match, and shows the full title, author, dynasty, and complete poem. It is not an AI and not a web search — it is a curated, deterministic, offline index of famous lines.
The corpus: Three Hundred Tang Poems + Poems of a Thousand Masters
The lines indexed here come from two of the most representative anthologies of classical Chinese verse. The 唐詩三百首 (Three Hundred Tang Poems), compiled by the Qing-era scholar Sun Zhu (蘅塘退士), is the most widely circulated primer of Tang poetry. Its preface quotes the line "read the Three Hundred Tang Poems well, and you'll recite verse even if you can't compose it", but introduces it with 諺云, "as the saying goes": it was already a proverb, not the compiler's own. The 千家詩 (Poems of a Thousand Masters) is a long-standard children's anthology from the Song–Yuan era onward, dominated by Tang and Song quatrains and regulated verse on the seasons and everyday life. The two hold 320 and 219 entries; 28 poems are in both, so this tool indexes 511. Every work is public-domain classical text, and the poem data comes from the open-source chinese-poetry project, stored in Traditional characters. That Traditional text was converted mechanically from Simplified, and the conversion picked the wrong character in places — 明月鬆間照 ("loose") for 明月松間照 ("pine") — so we corrected it line by line against Wikisource.
How script-agnostic search works
Traditional Chinese is not one spelling. This corpus uses OpenCC's standard Traditional forms (爲, 裏, 峯); Taiwan writes 為, 裡, 峰. An earlier version converted only your query, into the Taiwan forms, and compared it with the standard-form text, so famous lines such as 獨在異鄉爲異客 and 獨坐幽篁裏 could not be found whether you typed them in Simplified or Traditional. Now your query and every line of every poem pass through the same OpenCC converter into Simplified, with punctuation removed, before they are compared. We tested every clause of four characters or more in the corpus, all 4,274 of them, typed four ways — Simplified, standard Traditional, Taiwan and Hong Kong forms — and every one finds its poem. The Simplified interface shows the poems in Simplified; Traditional and English keep the stored Traditional text. All conversion runs in your browser. If OpenCC fails to load, Traditional queries still work and Simplified ones may not.
"Read the Three Hundred Tang Poems well, and you'll recite verse even if you cannot compose it." — a saying, quoted in the preface to the 唐詩三百首 with 諺云, "as the saying goes" (Wikisource)
A cultural-reference tool
This tool is meant to help you revisit, verify, and appreciate classical lines — ideal for students checking their recitation, writers tracing a quotation to its source, and anyone wandering through the canon for pleasure. It indexes curated classics rather than the exhaustive corpus of all Tang poetry, so obscure works may not appear — a deliberate trade-off that keeps every entry a piece worth reading again and again. Result ordering is deterministic: exact whole-line matches come first, the rest follow the anthology order, and no randomness is ever used. Wherever you are — Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or anywhere in the world — may this small index of famous lines help you reconnect with that half-remembered verse lingering in your mind.
A Thousand Masters holds a couple of hundred poems
The 唐詩三百首 was compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu (蘅塘退士). His preface says only 「共三百餘首」, "three hundred and some"; the two digital editions we counted (Wikisource and chinese-poetry) both hold 320, and this tool indexes those 320. Printed editions vary.
"Read the Three Hundred Tang Poems well and you'll recite verse even if you can't compose it" is not the compiler's own line: his preface introduces it with 諺云, "as the saying goes". The same preface says he made the anthology to replace the 千家詩, the primer village schools were using.
Despite its name "a thousand masters", the edition used here holds 219 poems, 28 of them also in the 唐詩三百首 — mostly Tang–Song quatrains and regulated verse arranged by season — and ranks alongside the 三字經 and 百家姓 as a classic children's primer.
Tang poetry's two main forms are the 絕句 (quatrain, four lines) and 律詩 (regulated verse, eight lines). Quatrains flash and condense; regulated verse demands strict parallelism in its middle couplets — together they form the skeleton of "recent-style" poetry.
Li Bai (the Poet-Immortal), Du Fu (the Poet-Sage), and Wang Wei (the Poet-Buddha) are Tang poetry's three peaks. Du Fu has the most entries in the 唐詩三百首, reflecting the compiler's esteem for his weighty, deliberate style.
Wang Zhihuan's 登鸛雀樓 — "The white sun sets behind the mountains, the Yellow River flows to the sea; to see a thousand miles, climb one more storey" — is just twenty characters, yet the timeless masterpiece of aspirational ascent poetry.
Converting Simplified to Traditional can pick the wrong character, because one Simplified form can stand for two Traditional ones. The open dataset behind this tool wrote 明月鬆間照 (鬆, "loose") for 明月松間照 (松, "pine"), 徵人 for 征人 and 南鬥 for 南斗. We corrected 66 lines and 6 titles against Wikisource.
Classical poetry's 平仄 (level-and-oblique tones) is its tonal meter: level tones are long, oblique tones short, and their alternation gives a line its musical rhythm — one reason these poems are so singable and easy to memorise.
Many idioms come from poems: 春風得意 from Meng Jiao's 登科後. 柳暗花明 was made famous by Lu You's 遊山西村, but the four characters already appear in a Tang poem by Wu Yuanheng, two centuries earlier: 「柳暗花明池上山」.
Classical poetry still lives in Chinese culture today — in festival couplets, song lyrics, calligraphy, and place names. These 511 poems form a shared memory spanning a thousand years, passed down across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora.
Frequently Asked Questions
-
Yes — that is the tool's core purpose. Just type any continuous fragment you remember, even two or three characters. The tool scans every line of all 511 poems, lists each poem containing your fragment, and highlights the match.
-
Yes. Your query and every line of every poem pass through the same OpenCC converter into Simplified, with punctuation removed, before they are compared — so "黄河" finds "黃河" and 独在异乡为异客 finds 獨在異鄉爲異客. Simplified and Traditional input both work, including the two Traditional spellings of characters such as 為/爲 and 裡/裏.
-
Yes. The search covers each poem's lines, title, and author together. Typing 李白 lists the indexed Li Bai poems; typing 靜夜思 jumps straight to that poem.
-
The corpus comes from two anthologies: the 唐詩三百首 (320 entries) and the 千家詩 (219). Twenty-eight poems are in both and are counted once, for 511 in all, mostly Tang–Song quatrains and regulated verse. Each result card says which anthology the poem is from. It is curated classics, not the exhaustive Tang corpus, so obscure works may not appear.
-
Exact whole-line matches rank first (meaning you remembered a complete line), followed by title/author matches, then partial-fragment matches, with the rest in the anthology's original order. Ordering is fully deterministic — no randomness.
-
Yes. The Simplified interface converts the poems to Simplified (via OpenCC) for easier reading; the Traditional and English interfaces keep the stored Traditional text. Either way, source and author information is shown in full.
-
No. The poem data is a JSON file your browser downloads once from our server when the page loads. After that, search, conversion and highlighting all happen on your device, and what you type is never sent anywhere. RECATOOLS does not track or store your searches.
-
This is a curated index covering only the 唐詩三百首 and 千家詩. If a poem is outside these two anthologies, or your fragment differs slightly from the original wording or punctuation, it may not appear. Try a shorter fragment — just the two or three key characters.
-
These Tang and Song poems are long in the public domain and free to quote — just cite the author and title. The poem data comes from the open-source chinese-poetry project, released under the MIT licence (© 2016 JackeyGao); we corrected its Simplified-to-Traditional conversion errors against Wikisource.
-
Conversion is switched off and the poems display in Traditional. Traditional queries still work, including both spellings of characters such as 為/爲; Simplified queries may not.
Pick up where you left off
Stored only in this browser — never sent to our servers.