Thousand Character Classic (千字文)

The Thousand Character Classic (千字文) is a Chinese poem used as a primer for teaching Chinese characters to children. It contains exactly one thousand unique characters. It is said that Emperor Wu of the Liang Dynasty (r. 502-549) made 周興嗣 (Chow Hing-Ji) compose this poem for his prince to practice calligraphy. The original title of the poem was 《次韻王羲之書千字》 and it is sung in the same way in which children learning Latin alphabet writing do with the "alphabet song".

Here is a link to the complete essay, available in Chinese characters, Pinyin, and English:

http://www.angelfire.com/ns/pingyaozhuan/tce.html