Schoolchildren across the Chinese-speaking world learn Li Bai's "Quiet Night Thoughts" (靜夜思) as 床前明月光 … 舉頭望明月: "before my bed, the bright moonlight … I raise my head to gaze at the bright moon". The Complete Tang Poems (全唐詩), compiled for the Kangxi emperor and prefaced in 1707, prints the same poem as 牀前看月光 … 舉頭望山月: "before my bed I look at the moonlight … I raise my head to gaze at the mountain moon". The version recited today is the one printed in a later, much smaller book, the Three Hundred Tang Poems (唐詩三百首).
That book holds 320 poems in both digital editions we counted, and its preface never promised exactly 300: it says "三百餘首", three hundred and some. The 1707 collection gathered more than 48,900 poems, which makes the anthology about one in 153 of them. The best current estimate of how many Tang poems survive is about 53,000, and against that it is about one in 166.
The line
"Quiet Night Thoughts" is not the only famous poem where the recited words and the imperial collection part company. We compared four lines in the anthology with the Siku Quanshu text of the Complete Tang Poems on Wikisource, an unproofread transcription that says so in its own banner.
| Poem | The anthology | Complete Tang Poems |
|---|---|---|
| 靜夜思, Li Bai | 床前明月光 / 舉頭望明月 | 牀前看月光 / 舉頭望山月 |
| 黃鶴樓, Cui Hao | 昔人已乘黃鶴去 | 昔人巳乗白雲去, with a note that one text has 黃鶴 |
| 楓橋夜泊, Zhang Ji | 江楓漁火對愁眠 | 江楓漁父對愁眠, with a note that one text has 火 |
| 八陣圖, Du Fu | 名成八陣圖 | 名髙八陣圖 |
In "Yellow Crane Tower" the ancients leave on white clouds rather than a yellow crane, and at Maple Bridge an old fisherman replaces the fishing lights. Neither text is simply right; the imperial editors printed the readings they had and noted some alternatives. The popular line 斗酒詩百篇, "a gallon of wine, a hundred poems", is a paraphrase too. Du Fu's own words in the collection are 李白一斗詩百篇.
The poem
Most people now meet these poems in free digital texts, and those carry a different kind of variant. Many were typed in Simplified characters and converted to Traditional one character at a time, a process that cannot distinguish which of two Traditional characters a single Simplified one stands for. This is how Wang Wei's 明月松間照, "the bright moon shines between the pines", appeared in one widely used dataset as 明月鬆間照, with 鬆 ("loose") in place of 松 ("pine"). The same process produced 徵 for 征 ("to march") and wrote 鹹 ("salty") for 咸 in 咸京, a name for the capital. The dataset's notes on its Tang collection warn that it still contains a large number of errors. Our guide to why Simplified and Traditional are not a swap explains the mechanism, and how China, Taiwan and Unicode choose a character covers the variant forms, such as 爲 and 為, that tripped up our own search.
Our own Chinese poetry line search was built on that dataset and inherited the problem. Until September 2026 it also converted every query into Taiwan-standard characters while the poems were stored in different standard forms, so 5 to 6% of the corpus's own clauses could not be found by a reader typing them exactly, in either script, including 獨在異鄉為異客, one of the best-known lines in the language. We corrected 66 lines against Wikisource and changed the matching so both sides are compared in one form; replaying all 4,274 clauses now finds every one.
The poet
The anthology is dominated by four poets. Du Fu has 39 poems, Li Bai 34, Wang Wei 29 and Li Shangyin 24, which is 126 of the 320, or 39%. Thirty-five poets appear once. The total is about 77 poets, depending on how two disputed attributions and a few name forms are counted.
The most striking gap is Bai Juyi's. He has six poems in the anthology, two of them the long "Song of Everlasting Sorrow" and "Song of the Pipa". Under his name in a digital transcription of the imperial collection we counted 2,609 titles, and a title is not always one poem, so treat that as a rough scale. Six of about 2,600 is roughly 0.2%. Wang Wei has 29 poems in the anthology against 341 titles, roughly 8.5%. By this rough measure the compiler picked Wang Wei at more than thirty times Bai Juyi's rate. That is arithmetic about one editor's taste, not a judgement on either poet.
The anthology
The Three Hundred Tang Poems was compiled, by tradition around 1763, by Sun Zhu (孫洙). His preface says he chose widely loved poems, "a few dozen of each form, three hundred and some in all", to replace an older primer, the Poems of a Thousand Masters (千家詩), which in his view did not tell good work from bad. The famous saying, 熟讀唐詩三百首，不會作詩也會吟, "read the three hundred Tang poems well and you can chant a poem even if you cannot write one", is introduced in that preface as a proverb (諺云), so it was already in circulation. He quoted it; he did not coin it.
The two digital editions we counted (from Wikisource and the chinese-poetry dataset) agree on 320 poems, broken into seven sections. The count includes 35 old-style poems of five characters a line and 28 of seven; 44 yuefu ballads; 80 regulated verses of five characters and 53 of seven; and 29 quatrains of five characters and 51 of seven. Regulated verse and quatrains make up two-thirds of the book. Printed editions are reported to differ by a few poems, but we could not check a scan of any of them. Our Tang poetry browser holds 40 of them in the anthology's own text; until September 2026, eight of its forty were not from the anthology at all.
The imperial collection
The Complete Tang Poems was ordered in 1705 and finished the following year, and its preface, dated 1707, gives its own count: "more than 48,900 poems by more than 2,200 people, arranged in 900 volumes". The words "more than" are in the original. The Palace Museum's catalogue entry gives 2,246 authors. A count by the Japanese scholar Hiraoka Takeo, cited by the Fudan scholar Chen Shangjun, gives 49,403 poems and 1,555 fragments by 2,576 authors. Our own count of titled entries in a digital transcription gave 43,103, and expanding every title such as "ten poems on the capital" into ten gave up to about 55,000. Where the official figure lands depends on what counts as one poem.
Three centuries of scholarship have moved the number both ways. Chen Shangjun records that 663 poems and 38 fragments in the collection are not from the Tang at all, and that one study examined 6,858 poems printed twice or wrongly included. Supplements compiled since then have recovered more than 6,300 poems the imperial editors missed. Setting the recovered poems against the ones removed, Chen's own estimate is that about 53,000 Tang poems survive, "conservatively", and at most 54,000. In the same article he notes that forgeries and misattributions together run to two or three thousand poems, so the figure remains an estimate that rests on judgements about individual poems. The "57,000 Tang poems" quoted online comes from a digital dataset that splits sets of poems into separate records, and is not a count of the Complete Tang Poems or of what survives.
