page_title: Middle Chinese
section_title: Rime dictionaries
hierarchical_section_title: Middle Chinese / Sources / Rime dictionaries
caption_attribution_description: English: First page of the Song edition of the Guangyun. 中文（繁體）‎: 宋本廣韻首頁。
context_page_description: Middle Chinese or the Qieyun system is the historical variety of Chinese recorded in the Qieyun, a rime dictionary first published in 601 and followed by several revised and expanded editions. The Swedish linguist Bernard Karlgren believed that the dictionary recorded a speech standard of the capital Chang'an of the Sui and Tang dynasties. However, based on the more recently recovered preface of the Qieyun, most scholars now believe that it records a compromise between northern and southern reading and poetic traditions from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. This composite system contains important information for the reconstruction of the preceding system of Old Chinese phonology.
  The fanqie method used to indicate pronunciation in these dictionaries, though an improvement on earlier methods, proved awkward in practice. The mid-12th-century Yunjing and other rime tables incorporate a more sophisticated and convenient analysis of the Qieyun phonology. The rime tables attest to a number of sound changes that had occurred over the centuries following the publication of the Qieyun.
context_section_description: Chinese scholars of the Northern and Southern dynasties period were concerned with the correct recitation of the classics.
  Various schools produced dictionaries to codify reading pronunciations and the associated rhyme conventions of regulated verse.
  The Qieyun (601) was an attempt to merge the distinctions in six earlier dictionaries, which were eclipsed by its success and are no longer extant.
  It was accepted as the standard reading pronunciation during the Tang dynasty, and went through several revisions and expansions over the following centuries.
  The Qieyun is thus the oldest surviving rime dictionary and the main source for the pronunciation of characters in Early Middle Chinese (EMC).  At the time of Bernhard Karlgren's seminal work on Middle Chinese in the early 20th century, only fragments of the Qieyun were known, and scholars relied on the Guangyun (1008), a much expanded edition from the Song dynasty.  However, significant sections of a version of the Qieyun itself were subsequently discovered in the caves of Dunhuang, and a complete copy of Wang Renxu's 706 edition from the Palace Library was found in 1947.
  The rime dictionaries organize Chinese characters by their pronunciation, according to a hierarchy of tone, rhyme and homophony.  Characters with identical pronunciations are grouped into homophone classes, whose pronunciation is described using two fanqie characters, the first of which has the initial sound of the characters in the homophone class and second of which has the same sound as the rest of the syllable (the final).  The use of fanqie was an important innovation of the Qieyun and allowed the pronunciation of all characters to be described exactly; earlier dictionaries simply described the pronunciation of unfamiliar characters in terms of the most similar-sounding familiar character.
  The fanqie system uses multiple equivalent characters to represent each particular initial, and likewise for finals.  The categories of initials and finals actually represented were first identified by the Cantonese scholar Chen Li in a careful analysis published in his Qièyùn kǎo (1842).  Chen's method was to equate two fanqie initials (or finals) whenever one was used in the fanqie spelling of the pronunciation of the other, and to follow chains of such equivalences to identify groups of spellers for each initial or final. For example, the pronunciation of the character 東 was given using the fanqie spelling 德紅, the pronunciation of 德 was given as 多特, and the pronunciation of 多 was given as 德河, from which we can conclude that the words 東, 德 and 多 all had the same initial sound.
  The Qieyun classified homonyms under 193 rhyme classes, each of which is placed within one of the four tones.  A single rhyme class may contain multiple finals, generally differing only in the medial (especially when it is /w/) or in so-called chongniu doublets.
caption: The start of the first rhyme class of the Guangyun (東 dōng "east")
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