In the past, being a prince did not require a qualification examination, generally as long as you were the eldest son of the emperor. Therefore, there are so many mediocre and even demented princes in history, like Liu Adou who cannot be supported.
But Xiao Tong is different, he is really a clear stream in the princely world, and he can simply comment on the "three good princes":
The first was to be kind to his parents, who were said to have served very diligently during his mother's serious illness, mourning so much that he was tired and thin into a bolt of lightning.
The second is to be good to the people, to be more lenient in dealing with criminals, and to provide relief to the poor in years of disaster and famine.
The third is to study well, and when I was five years old, I read the "Five Classics" in the "Four Books and Five Classics" all over again. Later, he has always loved to learn.
Xiao Tong's study was good, and he could not do without the painstaking efforts of his father, Xiao Yan, the Emperor of Liangwu. Xiao Yan himself was a literary youth when he was young, and he participated in a poet group called "Eight Friends of Jingling".
Dad was very concerned about Xiao Tong's study, and specially set up a teaching team of more than ten people, and brought in more than a dozen famous teachers and companions, with a very strong lineup, such as Shen Yue, a well-known literary historian in the country, and Lu Qian, a poet in the previous "Eight Friends of Jingling", who read with the prince.
What is this concept? It is equivalent to pulling the most famous professors and experts in domestic universities, as well as the Ministry of Culture and the Ministry of Education today to be a tutor for a small child. In addition, Xiao Tong himself is very smart, so learning has always been very good. Everyone thinks that if he becomes emperor, he will most likely be a good emperor.
Unfortunately, this "Three Good Prince" did not live long and died at the age of thirty-one. This was really a big loss for the Liang Dynasty. If Xiao Tong had become emperor, there would have been no younger brother Xiao Xuan or anything, and there would have been no incident of the mad emperor "burning books in Jiangling".
Although Xiao Tong died early, he did a remarkable thing in his short thirty years of life. He led a group of literati to compile a book, the main content of which was to select the best of the past poems and articles, and organize them into categories, called "Anthology of Literature".
Is the name "Anthology" a bit ordinary at first glance? In fact, when compiling the book, for a period of time, the era name of the Liang Dynasty was really called "ordinary". Of course, this "ordinary" does not mean "ordinary", but to be taken apart and explained, which is the meaning of "vast and accessible".
The name of the Anthology is very ordinary, but the content is not ordinary at all. Why? There are several reasons. First of all, it's a thick book. Don't laugh, thick is meaningful, indicating that it contains a large number of poems and articles. The Anthology contains more than 700 poems by more than 130 authors from the Zhou Dynasty to the Liang Dynasty.
The second "unusual" is that it is the first truly literary collection in Chinese history.
Everyone should note that before the Anthology, there were many similar collections, but they were not pure literary works. In addition to the poetry and song, they also include some other "miscellaneous" texts, such as recording history, formulating laws, teaching you to farm and fish... These are not "literature", and these books are not pure literary collections.
The third "not ordinary" is that it has a good vision for selecting works, and the selected articles, poems, and works are of the highest quality. Xiao Tong's aesthetic vision is very remarkable, completely worthy of so many teachers that his father has found.
He chose poems and essays, and if he didn't read anything else, he looked at two words: DianLi. That is to say, poetry must be both elegant and aesthetic. This was a very atmospheric aesthetic at the time, definitely not washing and blowing, definitely not low.
Therefore, you will find that although the aesthetic vision of the Liang Dynasty people at that time was not very good, and they all liked soft and gentle palace poetry, the "Anthology of Literature" was different, and it still included many other types of good poems, such as Ruan Yuan's Yonghuai poems, Bao Zhao's Lefu poems, and Xie Lingyun's landscape poems... Therefore, when this high-quality book was "published", it immediately caught fire and quickly spread, and the "book market best-seller list" at that time was a fire for hundreds of years.
In the Tang Dynasty, the Anthology of Literature was quite popular, and many people were specializing in studying it. At that time, the study of "Anthology" became a discipline called "Selection", just like the later study of "Dream of the Red Chamber" called "Red Studies". This may be something that Xiao Tong did not expect when he was alive. For a long time, this book was the most important textbook on the desk of Chinese poets. Li Bai and Du Fu both grew up nibbling on this book. If there were no "Anthology", whether Li Bai and Du Fu would have produced it would be a question. (Excerpt from Liushen Leilei's "Lessons in Tang Poetry for Children")