Yupian

The Yupian is a circa 543 CE Chinese dictionary edited by Gu Yewang during the Liang Dynasty. It arranges 12,158 character entries under 542 , which differ somewhat from the original 540 in the ''Shuowen Jiezi''. Each character entry gives a fanqie pronunciation gloss and a definition, with occasional annotation.

Baxter describes the textual history:
The original ''Yùpiān'' was a large and unwieldy work of thirty ''juàn'' , and during Táng and Sòng various abridgements and revisions of it were made, which often altered the original ''f?nqiè'' spellings; of the original version only fragments remain , and the currently-available version of the ''Yùpiān'' is not a reliable guide to Early Middle Chinese phonology.
In 760, during the Tang Dynasty, Sun Jiang compiled a ''Yupian'' edition, which he noted had a total of 51,129 words, less than a third of the original 158,641. In 1013, Song Dynasty scholar Chen Pengnian published a revised ''Daguang yihui Yupian'' . The Japanese monk Kūkai brought an original version ''Yupian'' back from China in 806, and modified it into his circa 830 ''Tenrei Banshō Meigi'', which is the oldest extant Japanese dictionary.