The focus of this paper is on phonetic patterns of ancient Chinese poetry and Sino-Japanese poetry, and one objective is to assess the validity of the Cantonese dialect for reconstructing the phonetic rules of ancient Chinese poetry. A comparative data analysis is presented. While our results are in accordance with widely accepted facts in Chinese phonology on the topic, they also include several counter-intuitive exceptions. This study aims to be relevant not only in Chinese poetry but also in a Japanese literary context, as the work of a large number of prominent Japanese literary thinkers includes numerous Sino-Japanese poems, or nihon kanshi (日本漢詩), whose rules and patterns are known to be based on ancient Chinese phonetics rather than on Japanese phonetics. Numerical data and examples are provided
