Chinese Text Project
Chinese Text Project (CTP) is a digital library of early Chinese texts, with a focus on Chinese philosophy. Created by Donald Sturgeon and launched in 2006, it remains active and available in English and Chinese.
The site aims to provide accessible, accurate editions of many works, organized into pre-Qin/Han texts (by school of thought) and post-Han texts (by dynasty). The pre-Qin/Han section contains about 5.7 million Chinese characters, the post-Han section over 20 million, and the overall collection and related resources total a very large amount of text.
Many texts come with English translations paired to the original text, aligned paragraph by paragraph and even phrase by phrase for easy comparison. The platform offers many scholarly tools, including an integrated dictionary, word lists, parallel passages, scanned source texts, a concordance, metadata, and Chinese commentary display. It hosts a discussion forum and a resources database.
The Library section includes scanned copies of more than 36 million pages of early Chinese texts, linked line-by-line to the transcriptions in the database, with many pages created using OCR and edited via a crowd-sourced wiki model. Data and metadata can be exported through an API for use in other tools and digital humanities projects.
This page was last edited on 2 February 2026, at 19:20 (CET).