Yellow River is poetry in motion

The galloping Yellow River runs more than 5,400 kilometers and crosses nine provinces and autonomous regions in the country. It is the mother river that has been nourishing not only the people living in the north, but all of Chinese civilization for thousands of years.

The river, and its connection with the people, has been well documented in literature, and there are numerous poems dating back millennia dedicated to the river.

According to Liu Zhanfeng, a senior compiler of dictionaries and an expert on typology, from the time before Qin Dynasty (221-206 BC) to the late Qing Dynasty (1644-1911) there have been more than 300,000 poems hailing the mother river.

"Living and growing up by its side, the Yellow River means a lot to me," says the 67-year-old from Henan province. "It signals a spirit of perseverance and provides the energy to maintain vitality."

Inspired by the river, Liu and his team finished an 18-book collection of 8,000 Chinese poems about the Yellow River, selected from the reservoir of 300,000-odd poems. The collection, Dictionary of Chinese Poetry: Volume of the Yellow River, has just been published as the first volume of the magnum opus Dictionary of Chinese Poetry that is planned to be a total of 16 volumes and published over the coming years.

Liu's contribution to the collection was listing all 8,000 poems in order of themed keywords, categorizing them with phrases that indicate content or location, among other things. Before the publication, the classical way to arrange such a large body of poems was by time or by author, or－because in ancient times, Chinese poems would be sung to certain formulaic melodies－by the title of the tune to sing the words to.