Thousand Character Classic Bead - 045 Chinese Characters Meditation bead for training and learning. ??? The Thousand Character Classic (also known as the Thousand Character Text) is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children from the sixth century onward. It contains exactly one thousand characters, each used only once, arranged into 250 lines of four characters apiece and grouped into four line rhyming stanzas to make it easy to memorize.