The Book of Songs is China's first collection of realistic poems. It was honored as a Confucian classic in the Western Han Dynasty, and later called The Book of Songs. Based on the desire and urgency of understanding the people's feelings of the lower classes, the rulers of the Western Zhou Dynasty carried out large-scale folk song collection activities, which cost a lot of manpower and material resources.

The description of poetry-picking in Hanshu Shihuozhi is more accurate. There is a scene of "In March in Meng Chun, pedestrians are shaking Muduo, preferring the road of poetry-picking", and there is also a scene of "offering a master, better than his temperament, to smell the emperor".

This means that in spring, when people go out and work in the fields, there are poetry collectors called "pedestrians" patrolling the road, tapping wooden badminton and collecting songs they sing while farming. Then the collected poems were dedicated to the music master, who sang them to the emperor with melody.

The time span of The Book of Songs is about 500-600 years, and its distribution area is centered on the Yellow River Basin and distributed in Shaanxi, Gansu, Shanxi, Shandong, Hebei, Henan, Anhui, Hubei and other places.

According to textual research, the works in The Book of Songs were produced after Zhou Wuwang destroyed the Shang Dynasty (BC 1066), so the poems included in it were produced from the early Western Zhou Dynasty to the mid-Spring and Autumn Period.

The Book of Songs contains a lot of geographical information, including geographical environment, phenological experience, weather phenomena, settlements and city sites, which reflects the geographical situation and people's understanding level at that time.