The Shijing, Book of Songs or Odes, is 305 poems in archaic Chinese from roughly the eleventh to the seventh century BCE — courtship songs, complaints about conscription and taxation, harvest songs, dynastic hymns and sacrificial pieces. Confucius quotes it constantly and says in Analects 2.2 that the three hundred poems can be summed up in one phrase from the collection itself: no twisty thoughts. Its practical importance in the Spring and Autumn period was diplomatic — envoys quoted odes at each other to convey positions indirectly, and quoting aptly was a professional skill, so Confucius's remark to his son in 16.13 that without studying the Odes he would have nothing to say is literal advice, not sentiment. The tradition subsequently read the love poems allegorically as political commentary, which preserved them in the canon and buried their plain sense; the Han Mao commentary supplies a moralising preface to each. Modern Chinese readers have largely reclaimed them as poems.