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''Star Gauge'' (), also known as ''Xuanji Tu (Picture of the Turning Sphere)'' is a Chinese poem written in the 4th century A.D. ==Description== The Star Gauge consists of over 3,000 smaller poems woven in a complex pattern.〔Hinton, 108〕 It was written by Su Hui in the 4th century AD,〔Hinton, 105〕 a time during which the Three-Treatise School was the predominating philosophical school in the area.〔Chan, 357〕 One rule governs the reading of all the poems. It is this: the second line of every couplet must rhyme with that of the next.〔Hinton, 108〕 The first set of poems are 2,848 four-liners with seven characters per line. The maroon grid is made up of 32 seven-character phrases. These are read in certain patterns around the perimeter, and in other patterns for the internal grid.〔Hinton, 108〕 The poem was described by contemporary sources as shuttle-woven on brocade, meant to be read in a circle, and consisting of 112 or else 840 characters. By the Tang period, the following story about the poem was current:〔Wang, 51〕 :Dou Tao of Qinzhou was exiled to the desert, away from his wife Lady Su. Upon departure from Su, Dou swore that he would not marry another person. However, as soon as he arrived in the desert region, he married someone. Lady Su composed a circular poem, wove it into a piece of brocade, and sent it to him.〔Wang, 51〕 Another source, naming the poem as ''Xuanji Tu'' (''Picture of the Turning Sphere''), claims that it was a palindromic poem comprehensible only to Dou (which would explain why none of the Tang sources reprinted it), and that when he read it, he left his desert wife and returned to Su Hui.〔Wang, 52〕 The text of the poem was circulated continuously in medieval China and was never lost, but during the Song Dynasty it became scarce. The 112 character version was included in early sources. The earliest excerpts of the 840 character version date from a 10th-century text by Li Fang. Several 13th century copies were attributed to famous women of the Song Dynasty, but falsely so.〔Wang, 80-81〕 It was also mentioned in the story ''Flowers in the Mirror''. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Su Hui's Star Gauge」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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