These some three hundred poems from the Tang Dynasty (618-907)-an age in which poetry and the arts flourished-were gathered in the eighteenth century into what became one of the best-known books in the world, and which is still cherished in Chinese homes everywhere. Many of China's most famous poets-Du Fu, Li Bai, Bai Juyi, and Wang Wei-are represented by timeless poems about love, war, the delights of drinking and dancing, and the beauties of nature. There are poems about travel, about grief, about the frustrations of bureaucracy, and about the pleasures and sadness of old age.

Nearly every Chinese household owns a copy of Tang Shi and poems from it are still included in textbooks and to be memorized by students.

Peter Harris is the founder of the Asian Studies Institute at Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand, and the editor of the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets anthology Zen Poems.