Classical Chinese Texts

A collection of Classical Chinese Texts, as codified in the Song Dynasty. Texts have been provided in both Chinese and English.

Resources in this category:

Ancient Chinese historical text
http://www.shuku.net:8082/dblx/html/3/66-2-0.html

This site provides pure classical Chinese texts of major historical records in ancient times that were deemed as classics.

Li Ki (The Book of Rites), Part 1
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/liki/

The first volume of James Legge's translation of 3rd century BC compiled Chinese classic texts on Chinese religious practices from the 5th to the 8th centuries BC. These ten books offer minute descriptions of many different aspects of Chinese culture from this period.

Chinese Literature Classics
http://www.chinapage.com/classic1.html

A number of online classic Chinese texts in a variety of languages.

Classic of Daoist Virtue/ The Way of Virtue/ The Way and its Power/ Daode Jing/ Tao Te Ching
http://www.sacred-texts.com/tao/taote.htm

James Legge's translation of Lao Zi's (Lao-Tzu's) Daoist Classic.

Classical Chinese Historical Texts
http://www.guoxue.com/wenxian/wxshi/shibu.htm

This site includes the "history" (Shi) part of the Ming Dynasty Collection of ancient writing (Si Ku Quan Shu). Each entry has a brief introduction and a link to the full texts.

Classical Chinese Philosophical Texts
http://www.guoxue.com/wenxian/wxjing/jingbu.htm

This site includes the "classics" (Jing) part of the Ming Dynasty Collection of ancient writing (Si Ku Quan Shu). Each entry has a brief introduction and a link to the full text.

Classical Chinese text searchable archive
http://210.69.170.100/s25/index.htm

This site provides full-text keyword searches of almost all major classical Chinese texts. Their archive includes ancient Confucian texts, their Song and Ming dynasties annotations and commentaries, and some literary texts.

Classical Chinese text with dictionary
http://zhongwen.com/gudian.htm

This site includes such famous texts as the Tao Te Ching, the Art of War, the Analects, the Doctrine of the Mean, the Great Learning. Every character in the text is clickable. The dictionary on the right frame of the page will give the corresponding entries when a character is clicked. Very good for students of Classical Chinese.

Classical Chinese Texts
http://cnd.org/Classics/

This is a collection of almost all ancient text, each with a brief English description. Texts include: I Ching, Tao Te Ching, Analects, Da Xue, Doctrine of the Mean, Classic of Filial Piety, Art of War, Mencius, Zhaungzi, Xun zi, Guigu Zi, Shi Jing. There are also links to classical literary texts, such as poetry and novels.

Confucian Analects : the Lun Yu
http://www.confucius.org/main01.htm

This site contains the Lun Yu (499 sayings of Confucius) in more than twenty languages, as well as a varying amount of other Confucius related contents for each language.

The Yi King
http://www.sacred-texts.com/ich/ictp.htm

James Legge's translation of the Confucian classic, including pictures of the hexagrams.

The LI KI (THE BOOK OF RITES) Part II
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/liki2/

James Legge's translation of the second half of the Book of Rites, one of the Confucian classics.

Mencius
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/menc/

James Legge's translation of the works of Mencius (Mengzi).

Shi Jing: the Book of Odes
http://afpc.asso.fr/wengu/wg/wengu.php?l=Shijing

Text is displayed in traditional Chinese characters with translations given in both English and French. This site has a very useful feature in its dictionary components—rolling over a character with your mouse will display a rollover menu with a pronunciation guide and meaning. Clicking on a character will open a dictionary in a separate window, containing a much more comprehensive entry. Features translations by Legge and Garnet.

The Shu King or the Book of Historical Documents
http://www.sacred-texts.com/cfu/sbe03/shu00.htm

James Legge's translation of and commentary on the Confucian Classic of History.

University of Virginia Chinese Text Initiative
http://etext.virginia.edu/chinese/

A site for classic Chinese literature. As of 2008, the site has over 300 Tang Poems and poetry from authors Gu Yao Yan, Shi Jing, Hong Lou Meng, and Yu Xuan Ji. Literature is available in both English and Chinese.