Thousand Characters was a children's primer in ancient China. The rubbing in this model is from a 1109 stone inscription. Its writer was Zhi Yong, the seventh-generation descendent of the Wang Xizhi family and a Buddhist monk. Zhi Yong was skilled in cursive script. He practiced hard and long, relentlessly modeling himself after his illustrious ancestors. When he made a name for himself, so many admirers came to his door for his calligraphy that the threshold was eventually worn down. He covered the threshold with a sheets of iron, by which he was called the Iron Threshold. “Appearing modest at first, Zhi Yong's calligraphy is loftily spirited, and his technique combines the virtue of master-calligraphers in the past. Only by scanning his work repeatedly can one get to his ingenuity,” commended Su Shi, a scholar-calligrapher in the Song dynasty.