predelection

Posted by Victor Mair

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For those who don't know what "Chinese Text Project" (CTP) is, here's a:

Brief introduction:

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.

(from the CTP homepage)

The Chinese Text Project (CTP; Chinese: 中國哲學書電子化計劃) is a digital library project that assembles collections of early Chinese texts. The name of the project in Chinese literally means "The Chinese Philosophical Book Digitization Project", showing its focus on books related to Chinese philosophy. It aims at providing accessible and accurate versions of a wide range of texts, particularly those relating to Chinese philosophy, and the site is credited with providing one of the most comprehensive and accurate collections of classical Chinese texts on the Internet.

Wikipedia

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Latest additions

AI translations and multilingual entity summaries

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 texts on an ongoing basis.

2026-03-01

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.

Recognition

CTP is the brainchild and handiwork of Donald Sturgeon, PhD in philosophy from the University of Hong Kong in 2014 and is currently an Assistant Professor in Computer Science at Durham University in the UK. His main interests are in Digital Humanities.

Asssessment

CTP constitutes a quantum transformation in the development of Sinology.

Selected readings

• "Hype over AI and Classical Chinese / Literary Sinitic" (11/9/23) — N.B.:  this was three years ago
• Endymion Wilkinson, Chinese History: A New Manual (1973-2025 [7 editions])
• Jack W. Chen, Anatoly Detwyler, Xiao Liu, Christopher M. B. Nugent, and Bruce Rusk, eds., Literary Information in China: A History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2021).   Reviewed by Victor H. Mair, MCLC Resource Center (September, 2022).

[h.t. Dave Thomas]

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