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Quantum state preparation is a fundamental and significant subroutine in quantum computing. In this paper, we conduct a systematic investigation of the circuit size (the total count of elementary gates in the circuit) for sparse quantum state preparation. A quantum state is said to be d-sparse if it has only d non-zero amplitudes. For the task of preparing an n-qubit d-sparse quantum state, we obtain the following results: - Without ancillary qubits: Any n-qubit d-sparse quantum state can be prepared by a quantum circuit of size O(nd/(log n) + n) without using ancillary qubits, which improves the previous best results. It is asymptotically optimal when d = poly(n), and this optimality holds for a broader scope under some reasonable assumptions. - With limited ancillary qubits: (i) Based on the first result, we prove for the first time a trade-off between the number of ancillary qubits and the circuit size: any n-qubit d-sparse quantum state can be prepared by a quantum circuit of size O((nd)/(log(n + m)) + n) using m ancillary qubits for any m ∈ O((nd)/(log nd) + n). (ii) We establish a matching lower bound Ω((nd)/(log(n+m))+n) under some reasonable assumptions, and obtain a slightly weaker lower bound Ω((nd)/(log(n+m)+log d) + n) without any assumptions. - With unlimited ancillary qubits: Given an arbitrary amount of ancillary qubits available, the circuit size for preparing n-qubit d-sparse quantum states is Θ((nd)/(log nd) + n).