Legend has it that Confucius studied Zhou Yi in his later years, and was very obsessed with it, because he read "Zhou Yi" so many times that the "Wei Bian" was broken three times. Therefore, an idiom was derived - "Wei Bian Sanjie".
What is "Wei Bian"?
Probably from the Zhou Dynasty onwards, people began to use bamboo chips as a carrier of writing. This carrier makes reading much easier, and the shape of the bamboo pieces can be cut more regularly, and they can be rolled up after being connected together, which looks like a book. Therefore, the earliest book in China is this kind of bamboo book.
Bamboo books are made by splitting bamboo into pieces and then connecting them together. A piece of bamboo is called "Jane", and multiple "Janes" are woven together with rope and become "books". "Book" is a hieroglyph, indicating the appearance of bamboo pieces strung together, but also called "weaving" or "chapter", in which the "Jane" is woven with silk rope is called "silk weaving" and the one woven with leather rope is called "Wei weaving". The compiled books are then rolled up into a volume, the article can be divided into several volumes, so far the volume of these statements are still the quantifiers to describe the book, and now many words related to the book have bamboo characters, such as the book of the book, the book of the household registration book, etc
The capacity of this bamboo book is very small. Generally speaking, only one line can be written vertically on the tablet, and a volume of bamboo can be written on both sides, which is only a few hundred words.
It is said that after Qin Shi Huang completed the great cause of national reunification, he had to read more than 100 kilograms of bamboo documents every day. The literary scholar Dongfang Shuo of the Western Han Dynasty wrote a sonata to Emperor Wu of the Han Dynasty, using nearly 3,000 bamboo tablets, and had to find someone to carry it into the palace with difficulty. It can be seen that what the ancients called "reading ten thousand books" sounds quite frightening, in fact, many modern people who like to read may have done it.
Excerpt from "Happy Chinese Studies"