Chinese Text Project

Welcome

Welcome to the Chinese Text Project homepage. The Chinese Text Project is an online open-access digital library that makes pre-modern Chinese texts available to readers and researchers all around the world. The site attempts to make use of the digital medium to explore new ways of interacting with these texts that are not possible in print. With over thirty thousand titles and more than five billion characters, the Chinese Text Project is also the largest database of pre-modern Chinese texts in existence.

You may wish to read more about the project, view the pre-Qin and Han, post-Han or Wiki tables of contents, or consult the instructions, FAQ, or list of tools. If you're looking for a particular Chinese text, you can search for texts by title across the main textual sections of the site.

網站有中、英文版本，也有繁、簡體版，可通過每頁左上角的連結隨時調整。

This site is provided as an open-access resource. If you use this site in your teaching or research, please ask your university library to subscribe. Donations are also greatly appreciated.

Latest additions

Date	ContentRSS
2026-03-01	AI translations and multilingual entity summariesTranslations of premodern Chinese texts generated using Artificial Intelligence have been added to ctext.org. This includes all texts in the pre-Qin and Han corpus that previously lacked translations, the 25 dynastic histories, as well as hundreds of other historical, literary, philosophical and poetic works. Translations will be added for other texts on an ongoing basis. Translations created using AI will inevitably contain mistakes; all translations are aligned with the source text at the sentence level to facilitate identification and correction of errors. Errors can be corrected using the dictionary function, which shows the sentence-by-sentence alignment and provides a direct editing function. Additionally, editable natural-language summaries of historical entities (people, written works, office titles etc.) in Chinese and English are now supported to supplement existing structured data in the Data Wiki; over 100,000 summaries are currently included, with more to follow. If you prefer not to have English translations displayed when viewing texts, simply click "None" under "Translation setting" at the top of the page.
2016-10-10	Harvard Yenching Library Chinese materials addedThanks to the support of Harvard Yenching Library, over 5 million pages of scanned materials from the Yenching Library collection have been added to the Library section of the site, including high quality images from the Chinese Rare Books Collection. Approximate transcriptions created using the ctext.org OCR procedure have also been added to the Wiki, making these materials full-text searchable. In future we hope to collaborate with other libraries to include materials from their Chinese language collections.

Previous technical updates are listed in the "Latest updates" forum. Please note that only major technical updates are listed here; for content updates and recently added texts (which occur daily and hourly), please log in and refer to the Wiki Recently Updated sections.

Recent discussion topics

Date	ContentRSS
2026-03-08by y4inpg	請問……　　請問這討論區已不能再發表議題嗎？ [More...] [1 reply]
2026-03-02by calepine	AI translation query[quote:130] Translations of premodern Chinese texts generated using Artificial Intelligence have been added to ctext.org. This includes all texts in the pre-Qin and Han corpus that previously lacked translations, the 25 dynastic histories, as well as hundreds of other historical, literary, philosophical and poetic works. Translations will be added for other [More...] [3 replies]
2025-01-19by y4inpg	太陽能板張開，古文見　　每當看、航天器升空完成星箭分離進入預定軌道後不久就會聽到：太陽能板打開、的宣告。這宣告在古時曰： [More...]

Fonts and Compatibility

In order to view the Chinese text on this site, you will need to have a Chinese font and compatible web browser installed. In addition, because the ancient texts on this site incorporate many now obsolete and rarely-used characters, you will need to install a Unicode font which provides support for such characters (often referred to as CJK Extensions A through D). A suitable font is the freely downloadable "Hanazono" font; "Han Nom" also includes many (though not all) of the required characters. To confirm whether your system properly supports these characters, please see the Font test page. Proper support for Unicode (including so-called 'surrogates') is also needed, which may cause additional problems for users with older operating systems.

The site is designed to comply to relevant W3C standards, and so should be usable in any standards-compliant web browser. However, as the emphasis on this site is on usability and not compatibility with legacy browsers, it is recommended that you upgrade to a browser with good standards support such as Mozilla Firefox Google Chrome to get the most out of the site.