Created and maintained by Donald Sturgeon, a postdoctoral fellow at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies and lecturer at the Department of East Asian Languages and Civilizations of Harvard University, the Chinese Text Project (CTP) is an online open-access digital library of pre-modern Chinese texts. With a focus on ancient texts related to Chinese philosophy, CTP contains various texts of philosophical, historical, linguistic or literary interest, produced during different periods of Chinese history. The base text/source text for CTP’s searchable digital version is usually an established print edition of the text. For a great number of texts, CTP has corrected its digital version against a printed edition. In addition, CTP scanned various print editions of the texts and assembled them in its Library section. All these scanned image of texts can be viewed, freely downloaded or displayed side by side for comparison. As a textual database, CTP “provides probably the most comprehensive and accurate classical Chinese texts on Internet” (Association of Chinese Philosophers in North America, 2016).
CTP features three reference tools that are most relevant and useful to sinologists who study early Chinese texts, including an integrated dictionary, parallel passage information and concordance indexing.
The CTP Dictionary provides important lexical information on Chinese characters, including radical and stroke information, alternate character forms, pronunciations in Mandarin pinyin, Cantonese jyutping and Stimson’s Tang reconstructions, locations or full entries from several standard-printed dictionaries, an English translation, different meanings of the character and a wide range of exemplary usage for each meaning drawn from the texts. The dictionary is fully integrated with the textual corpora, which allows users to check for basic lexical information by simply running the mouse over the characters while reading the text. It can also work as a stand-alone dictionary with robust search functions.
Text reuse or borrowing happened extensively in early Chinese texts, where identical or near-identical wording were shared among texts. To aid in the study of such text reuse or borrowing, CTP identifies the similar or identical passages, called parallel passage and displays them side by side with colours highlighting variation for easy comparison. In addition, this parallel passage feature visually presents the frequency of text reuse or borrowing with shades of colour, where the stronger the shade, the more texts have used a piece of parallel passage.
It has been a common practice for sinologists to cite early Chinese texts by simply referring to its location in a standard concordance in either the Harvard-Yenching Institute Sinological Index Series or the Chinese University of Hong Kong Institute of Chinese Studies Ancient Chinese Texts Concordance Series, for instance Harvard-Yenching Xunzi Yinde: 1/1/3. Without access to the print concordance, it often is difficult for authors to cite correctly and for readers to understand the citation. CTP provides the facility to determine an index reference by running the mouse over a passage of text or to locate a passage of text by searching an index reference.
