The book “Wenzi Mengqiu” (《文字蒙求》) was compiled by Wang Yun, a renowned scholar of the Qing Dynasty, to guide children in learning to recognize characters. It is a textbook for children’s Chinese character recognition with the nature of a dictionary. The main content of this book is to compile and explain the basic Chinese characters in “Shuowen Jiezi” (《説文解字》). This book not only plays a unique role in the enlightenment education of Chinese characters and the study of “Shuowen Jiezi” (《説文解字》), but also still holds significant values for our research on Chinese character teaching and application today. Based on a systematic review of the Chinese characters compilation styles of “Wenzi Mengqiu” (《文字蒙求》), this article conducts a relatively comprehensive and in-depth study on issues such as the number and types of characters compiled in this book, the coverage rate of the compiled characters in ordinary classical Chinese reading materials, and the similarities and differences between the compiled characters and the frequently used characters in modern Chinese.

First published in 1901, “Chengzhong Mengxuetang Zike Tushuo (澄衷蒙學堂字課圖說)” is the first Chinese textbook compiled by schools in China by Liu Shuping, Bai Zuolin, Cai Yuanpei and so on. The textbook mainly includes four parts: “ordinary examples”, “character inspection”, “character classification” and “Tushuo”, and contains “character selection”, “sequence arrangement of Chinese characters”, “rank division” and so on. This paper believes that the textbook has made a good explanation and practice on the Chinese character type selection, quantitative grading, classification of sequencing, and initially established the basic framework of the study of educational characters, which still has important enlightenment and guiding significance for the study of Chinese character education today.