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Chinese syllable sound charts
A rime table or rhyme table is a Chinese phonological model, tabulating the syllables of the series of rime dictionaries beginning with the Qieyun (601) by their onsets, rhyme groups, tones and other properties. The method gave a significantly more precise and systematic account of the sounds of those dictionaries than the previously used analysis, but many of its details remain obscure. The phonological system that is implicit in the rime dictionaries and analysed in the rime tables is known as Middle Chinese, and is the traditional starting point for efforts to recover the sounds of early forms of Chinese. Some authors distinguish the two layers as Early and Late Middle Chinese respectively. The earliest rime tables are associated with Chinese Buddhist monks, who are believed to have been inspired by the Sanskrit syllable charts in the Siddham script they used to study the language. The oldest extant rime tables are the 12th century Yunjing ('mirror of rhymes') and Qiyin lüe ('summary of the seven sounds'), which are very similar, and believed to derive from a common prototype. Earlier fragmentary documents describing the analysis have been found at Dunhuang, suggesting that the tradition may date back to the late Tang dynasty. Some scholars use the French spelling "rime", as used by the Swedish linguist Bernhard Karlgren, for the categories described in these works, to distinguish them from the concept of poetic rhyme.

The Qieyun, produced by Lu Fayan in 601, was a rime dictionary, serving as a guide to the recitation of literary texts and an aid in the composition of verse. It quickly became popular during the Tang dynasty, leading to a series of revised and expanded editions, the most important of which was the Guangyun (1008). In these dictionaries, characters were grouped first by the four tones, and then into rhyme groups. Each rhyme group was subdivided into groups of homophonous characters, with the pronunciation of each given by a fanqie formula, a pair of familiar characters indicating the sounds of the initial and final parts of a syllable respectively. The dictionaries typically used several characters for each initial or final. The fanqie method of indicating pronunciation made the dictionaries awkward to use. The (等韻學 'study of classified rhymes') was a more sophisticated analysis of the Qieyun pronunciations, initially developed by Chinese Buddhist monks who were studying Indian linguistics. A tantalizing glimpse of this tradition is offered by fragments from Dunhuang. A fragment held by the British Library (Or.8210/S.512) simply lists 30 initial consonants. Another document includes three fragments attributed to a monk called Shǒuwēn (守溫), who may have lived as early as the 9th century. These fragments do not contain tables, but describe the phonological analysis that underlies them. The oldest known rhyme tables are a version of the Yunjing published with prefaces dated 1161 and 1203, and the Qiyin lüe, which was included in the 1161 encyclopedia Tongzhi. The two are very similar, and are believed to be derived from a single version pre dating the Song dynasty. The tables were accompanied by a body of teachings known as (門法 'school precepts'), including rules for placing fanqie spellings that did not conform to the system within the tables. Later rhyme tables were more elaborate. The (四聲等子) was probably created during the Northern Song, and explicitly introduced broad rhyme classes ( 攝), which were previously implicit in the ordering of the tables. The preface of the (切韻指掌圖) is dated 1203, in the Southern Song. In this work the tables are restructured with separate columns for each of the 36 initials. The (經史正音切韻指南), produced by Liú Jiàn (劉鑑) in 1336, was the basis for one of the two sets of rime tables at the front of the Kangxi dictionary. The Yunjing was lost in China for several centuries. The Qieyun zhizhangtu, incorrectly attributed to the 11th century scholar Sima Guang, was believed to be the oldest of the rime tables, and was used in the earliest reconstruction efforts. However, in the 1880s several versions of the Yunjing were discovered in Japan. Comparison with the Qiyin lüe showed that they were based on a common model, of which the other rime tables were later refinements. All recent reconstruction work has been based on the Yunjing. The (覆宋永禄) edition of 1564 is considered the most reliable, and is the basis of all reproductions in circulation.

In the medieval rime dictionaries, characters were organized into rhyme groups (韵 ), with 193 groups in the Qieyun, growing to 206 in the Guangyun. The order of the rhyme groups within each tone implies a correspondence between rhyme groups across the four tones. Thus for each rhyme group with an m, n or ng coda in the level tone there are typically corresponding rhyme groups with the same coda in the rising and departing tones, and a corresponding rhyme group in the entering tone with a p, t or k coda respectively. In contrast, syllables with vocalic codas typically had corresponding rhyme groups only in the level, rising and departing tones. There were also four departing tone rhyme groups with j codas that had no counterparts in the other tones. The rime tables were solely concerned with the pronunciation of syllables of these rime dictionaries, and do not contain dictionary like material such as definitions. Similarly, where a group of characters are recorded as homophones in the rime dictionaries, typically only one will occur in a rime table. A rime table book presents these distinct syllables in a number of tabular charts, each devoted to one or more sets of parallel rhyme groups across the tones. The preface to Qieyun indicates that it represented a compromise between northern and southern reading pronunciations from the late Northern and Southern dynasties period. Most linguists now believe that no single dialect contained all the distinctions it recorded, but that each distinction did occur somewhere. The rime tables were compiled centuries later in the time of a new standard, and many of the distinctions in the Qieyun would have been meaningless to the compilers. Edwin Pulleyblank has argued that the tables contain enough evidence to reconstruct the speech of that later period. He calls this language Late Middle Chinese (LMC) in contrast to the Early Middle Chinese of the Qieyun, and argues that it was the standard speech of the imperial capital Chang'an in the late Tang dynasty. His reconstruction accounts for most of the distinctions in modern varieties of Chinese (except Min), as well as layers of Chinese loanwords, such as the Kan on layer of Sino Japanese vocabulary.