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Thursday
Sep062007

Lion Eating Poet in the Stone Den

The Lion-Eating Poet in the Stone Den (Simplified Chinese: 施氏食狮史; Traditional Chinese: 施氏食獅史; Pinyin: Shī Shì shí shī shǐ) is a famous example of constrained writing by Zhao Yuanren which consists of 92 characters, all with the sound shi in different tones when read in Mandarin. The text, although written in Classical Chinese, can be easily comprehended by most educated readers. However, changes in pronunciation over 2,500 years resulted in a large degree of homophony in Classical Chinese, so the poem becomes completely incomprehensible when spoken out in Putonghua or when written romanized.

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