Type of site Digital library Owner Donald Sturgeon Website ctext.org | Available in English and Chinese Created by Donald Sturgeon Alexa rank 38,208 (November 2016) | |
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, as well as being one of the most useful textual databases for scholars of early Chinese texts.
Site contents
Texts are divided into pre-Qin and Han texts, and post-Han texts, with the former categorized by school of thought and the latter by dynasty. The ancient (pre-Qin and Han) section of the database contains over 5 million Chinese characters, the post-Han database over 20 million characters, and the publicly editable wiki section over 5 billion characters. Many texts also have English and Chinese translations, which are paired with the original text paragraph by paragraph for ease of comparison.
As well as providing customized search functionality suited to Chinese texts, the site also attempts to make use of the unique format of the web to offer a range of features relevant to sinologists, including an integrated dictionary, word lists, parallel passage information, scanned source texts, concordance and index data, a metadata system, Chinese commentary display, a published resources database, and a discussion forum in which threads can be linked to specific data on the site. The "Library" section of the site also includes scanned copies of over 25 million pages of early Chinese texts, many of which are cross-linked by chapter to the full-text database.