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Beginners stand in a row before the master’s table and are taught to read the first line of the Three Character Classic, until they know it pretty well. Then they sit in their places and repeat it aloud. If one of them forgets a word, he goes up to the table again and asks his master how to read it, but he must not go too often.

What a din there is with some twenty boys all reading at the pitch of their voices! The teacher does not scold them, for the busier his pupils are at their work, the noisier they become. Whenever one of the class knows his task, he hands in his book, and turning his face away, so that his back is to his master, he repeats his lesson aloud. This ‘backing the book’ (as it is called), is to prevent a dishonest pupil from using his sharp black eyes to peep over the top of the page and help himself along.

After the Three Character Classic and The Hundred Surnames, which gives a list of the family names used in China, the schoolboy reads a book called The Thousand Character Classic. This book, made up of exactly a thousand characters, is said to have been written, by order of an emperor of China, in a single night. The scholar who wrote it worked so hard, that his hair, which was black when he began his task, had turned white when the book was finished next morning. The Four Books and other Classics, as the standard books of Chinese literature are called, are next begun by the pupil.