This Ancient Chinese Poem is a Machine | Tales From the Bottle

The Star Gauge (Chinese: 璇璣圖; pinyin: xuán jī tú) is a complex 4th-century Chinese poem composed by the poet Su Hui during the Sixteen Kingdoms period. This literary work is structured as a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters, renowned for its reversible nature. The grid functions as a palindrome poem, allowing it to be read in multiple directions to form approximately 3,000 smaller rhyming poems. Furthermore, the outer border of the arrangement forms a single, continuous circular poem, purportedly the first and longest poem of its kind.

The structure was historically described as being shuttle-woven on brocade. The composition coincided with a period when East Asian Mādhyamaka philosophy was prominent. The complexity of the Star Gauge has made its complete and accurate replication in English extremely challenging due to the intricate combinatorial possibilities inherent in the grid's arrangement.