China has a wealth of literature (in simplified Chinese 中国文学), including the prose and verses. The origin of the Chinese literature came from Shang Dynasty’s Oracle words.
In fact, the original forms of Chinese literature were folk songs and legends and also historical events. Gradually, it became in the form of articles, poems, songs, etc. After hundreds and even thousands of time, people added a lot of different features to these articles and literature, like parallel structure, personification, etc.
Talking about Chinese literature, the first collection should be definitely the Book of Songs (in simplified Chinese诗经). “The Book of Songs” is China’s earliest collection of poetry. This book was actually originally called “Poems”, having a total of 305 poems. Therefore, sometimes people would call this book the “Poetry 300”. Since the Han Dynasty, the Confucian regarded this book as the classic book.
In fact, writers of the poems in the Book of Songs were all unknown because most of the poems could not be traced back anymore. However, since Mao Chang, a scholar, had tried to write books about how to interpret the meaning and style of the poems in the book, some people also regard this Book of Songs the “Mao Book”.
Anyway, talking about the writers of the poems in this book, although the exact names of them could not be traced, we still know that these writers come mainly from the Yellow River Basin, the eastern part of Shanxi and Gansu Province, as well as the Hebei Province, east Shandong, and also the Jianghan basin.
“The Book of Songs”, according to the history, were basically formed during the Western Zhou Dynasty. The latest work was put into the book in the middle of the Spring and Autumn Period, which means the work in the book came across about 600 years of time.
According to some books, Confucius once edited the book and chose 300 poems for the book. However, this was not very correct, because when he was only 10, the basic structure of the book had been formed and so it might just be a fake thing.