Tonal Prosody in Chinese Parallel Prose‪.‬

--Marcus Aurelius, Meditations I (George Long, tr.) Parallelism in Chinese has a long history, and is found in some of the earliest written texts as well as official speeches. By late Six Dynasties times, there were three separate styles of parallelistic composition: plain, rhyming, and tonally alternating. The plain style seems to have been the most ancient, and in the Six Dynasties remained common in formal settings, including letters and memorials. Rhyming was common in fine literature such as fuh and admonitory genres including tzann [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], ming [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII], and beiwen [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII]. The tonally alternating style of composition was associated with lesser forms, such as prefaces and the short formal letter known as chii [TEXT NOT REPRODUCIBLE IN ASCII].