During the Shang Dynasty, due to the development of livestock industry and smelting industry technology, the living standards of slave owners were rapidly improved. For the sake of sacrifice and enjoyment, slave owners also developed music, singing and dancing. After the establishment of the Western Zhou Dynasty, due to the huge changes in the economic system, society made rapid progress in spiritual civilization.
The culture of the Western Zhou Dynasty has achieved unprecedented improvement through long-term accumulation and based on the gains and losses of previous generations. At this time, some people began to use poetry to record life, express emotions, praise love and praise labor. At that time, in order to inspect the folk customs of various places and understand the gains and losses of implementing policies, Duke Zhou, who assisted King Cheng of Zhou in governing the country, sent special poetry collectors to patrol the roads with big wooden bells and collect folk songs from the people. Then, the collected folk songs were handed over to historians, who compiled them into volumes and presented them to the Emperor of Zhou as a reference for national policy revision.
About the officials who collected poems in the Zhou Dynasty, it is recorded in ancient books as follows: In the month of Mengchun, the people living in groups were about to disperse, and passers-by vibrated the wood and stopped on the road to collect poems, and presented them to the imperial master to compare their music and rhythm. , to hear about it from the emperor. Therefore, it is said that the king knows the world without leaving his house.
Later, more and more of these poems were collected, reaching more than 3,000. Therefore, Duke Zhou asked people to compile these poems into a book, named it "The Book of Songs", and asked the emperor of Zhou and the nobles of the Zhou Dynasty to read this work. Therefore, the Book of Songs also became a cultural teaching material commonly used in education at that time, and being able to recite the Book of Songs became a necessary cultural quality for nobles. Some of the songs in the Book of Songs have become repertoire for various ceremonies and rituals, and some are sung at gatherings.