Chinese Text Project

Welcome

Welcome to my Chinese text project page. I am developing a web-based e-text system to present texts of ancient Chinese philosophy in a well-structured and properly cross-referenced manner making the most of the electronic medium to aid in the study and understanding of these texts.

You can either read more about the project or view the full table of contents.

Latest additions

My main focus at the moment is on creating the best possible digital version of the Mozi (Mo-Tzu) and the Mohist canons. All the Chinese text is on-line and searchable, and I have finished adding W. P. Mei's English translation of the text paragraph by paragraph. Many entries in the system are now cross-referenced - clicking on a name in the original text will take you to a simple description of the person, and display links to all other passages referencing them. Words with specific meanings within the Mohist Canons (e.g. gu, lei, etc.) are now cross-referenced in the same way.

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 Extension A and CJK Extension B). A suitable (and highly recommended) font is the freely downloadable "Han Nom" font. Microsoft's "Simsun Founder Extended" 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 versions of Windows.

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 CSS support such as Mozilla Firefox to get the most out of the site.