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)
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 corpus is in Traditional Chinese. Even if you type Simplified (e.g. 黄河), the tool converts your query to Traditional before matching, so both 簡/繁 queries 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 — the source of the proverb "read the Three Hundred Tang Poems well, and you'll recite verse even if you can't compose it." 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. Every work in both anthologies is public-domain classical text; this tool's poem data is sourced from the open-source chinese-poetry project. The originals are preserved in Traditional characters — the form closest to their historical appearance.
How script-agnostic search works
Because the corpus is Traditional while many users type in Simplified, the tool uses a query-side conversion strategy: when you enter a Simplified fragment, it first runs OpenCC to convert your query from Simplified to Traditional, then matches against the Traditional originals — so "黄河" finds "黃河" and "学" finds "學". Conversely, if you use the Simplified interface, the displayed poems are converted back to Simplified for smoother reading; Traditional and English interfaces keep the Traditional original. All conversion runs locally in your browser — nothing goes over the network, nothing is uploaded. And if OpenCC fails to load for any reason, the tool degrades gracefully, matching and displaying the raw original text without ever throwing an error.
"Read the Three Hundred Tang Poems well, and you'll recite verse even if you cannot compose it." — preface to the 唐詩三百首
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.
10 Facts about Classical Poetry & These Two Anthologies
The 唐詩三百首 was compiled by the Qing scholar Sun Zhu (蘅塘退士) and his wife Xu Lanying in the Qianlong era. It actually holds about 310 poems — "three hundred" is a round figure echoing the 詩經 tradition of "the three hundred odes".
The famous saying "read the Three Hundred Tang Poems well and you'll recite verse even if you can't compose it" captures the anthology's preface; for over two centuries it has been the Chinese world's most popular poetry primer.
Despite its name "a thousand masters", the 千家詩 holds only a couple of hundred poems — 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.
These classical texts are closest to their original form in Traditional characters. Simplified characters are a modern standard introduced from the 1950s onward; Tang and Song poets wrote in Traditional (orthodox) script.
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 everyday idioms originate in classical poetry — 柳暗花明 from Lu You, 春風得意 from Meng Jiao. Understanding a famous line often means understanding the source of an idiom.
Classical poetry still lives in Chinese culture today — in festival couplets, song lyrics, calligraphy, and place names. These 500+ famous works form a shared memory spanning a thousand years, passed down across Singapore, Malaysia, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the global Chinese diaspora.
Frequently Asked Questions
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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 500+ poems, lists each poem containing your fragment, and highlights the match.
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Yes. The corpus is Traditional, and the tool first converts your Simplified query to Traditional via OpenCC before matching — so "黄河" finds "黃河" and "学" finds "學". Both Simplified and Traditional input work.
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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.
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The corpus comes from two classic anthologies — the 唐詩三百首 and 千家詩 — totalling 500+ poems, mostly Tang–Song quatrains and regulated verse. It is curated classics, not the exhaustive Tang corpus, so obscure works may not appear.
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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.
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Yes. The Simplified interface converts the poems to Simplified (via OpenCC) for easier reading; the Traditional and English interfaces keep the Traditional original, closer to the historical form. Either way, source and author information is shown in full.
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No. The whole tool runs locally in your browser; the poem data is an offline JSON loaded with the page, and search, conversion, and highlighting all happen on your device with no server calls. RECATOOLS enforces zero-tracking and zero-storage.
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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.
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These are classical texts written over a thousand years ago and long in the public domain, free to quote. The tool's poem data is sourced from the open-source chinese-poetry project — just cite the author and title.
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The tool degrades gracefully: conversion is disabled and it matches/displays the raw Traditional text without ever throwing an error. A Simplified query may then miss the Traditional originals, but Traditional queries and browsing full poems still work fully.
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