Biji -- is a sort of miscellany covering a wide array of themes and subjects included in various descriptions such as anecdotes, notes, criticism and tales. Its miscellaneous contents have provided plentiful and valuable resources for numerous areas of Chinese studies, such as history, literature, art, music, geography, astronomy, food, flora and fauna, biography, government, laws and regulations, custom, religious beliefs, divination and even supernatural occurrences, or rather every branch of knowledge and any activity of all walks of life and all strata in society. They can be treated as records, and serve as very useful and helpful references.
The vast coverage of biji naturally necessitates a huge lexical corpus, which in turn provides us with valuable linguistic materials for studying not only the Tang language but also the Chinese lexicon and the development of Chinese lexis as a whole. This paper gives a lexical study on the proverbs -- used in the extant representatives of the biji written in the Tang dynasty (618-907). On one hand, the characteristics and definitions of proverbs are reviewed with specific reference to the examples found, and on the other, the functions and significance of the use of proverbs in Tang biji are discussed.