Resources for the study of Chinese texts

There are several online resources that can be used when researching and working with Chinese texts, most of which are freely available to all users. The following list is by no means exhaustive, and, as you will see, it focuses on ancient texts – which is my area of expertise–, with the occasional mention of other digital resources for the study of pre-modern sources. Below is also a list of textbooks, as a reminder that all these online and digital resources ought to be used in conjunction with original publications that introduce each subject.

Some disclaimers: I am familiar with the resources listed here differently. I use some every day; I know others only superficially, through sporadic use. As such, this page does not intend to provide complete explanations, nor should be read as a booklet of instructions – depending on the research you intend to conduct, you will find this extremely useful, handy, or not useful at all. I do not endorse, nor necessarily agree, with the entirety of the content available through the resources listed below. These are tools that have proved useful, in different measures, during my studies, and as such I intend to share them here with my personal take on them. This section also does not aim to be exhaustive of all extant resources.

If you are a scholar of ancient China, you can find more resources here. Paula Curtis also keeps a list of DH resources and projects on East Asia.

DATABASES

HUMANUM 漢語多功能字庫. Very handy database, also briefly reviewed in my second contribution to the Digital Orientalist, here. This website gives users many more options to explore.
The Guyin xiao jing 古音小鏡, the Holy Grail of data for Chiense Historical Linguistics. Read my reivew here. This website is continuously adding new sections. The interface is clear and the referneces are all clearly listed.
Open Ancient Chinese Characters Glyphs Database, 開放古文字字形. Ditto as for the above: I discussed this one in a previous publication.
For the Shuowen jiezi 說文解字, I like to use the database by A. Lucas and J.L. Schott, Shuowenjiezi.com. It is entirely FREE, and most of its funcations are accessible without registration (registration is also free). The search tab gives multiple options; there are several texts that are embedded in the website (under "Reference tools"), and on the right the website pulls out entires for the searched word from several Chinese texts.
Scripta Sinica 漢籍全文資料庫計書 is a very famous database, one of the few that is curated by an educational institution, Academia Sinica, and provides free access to all users to some of its content. As many have noticed, the bibliographical information for the original publications are not immediately available. A pro-tip: after you land on the page with the searched passage, you will see in the top area a small image of a book, right before the title of the text you are browsing. Copy and paste that small image of a book in a new tab in your browser, and you will find that the image is replaced by the bibliographical information previously "encoded" in the image.
Ctext. Extremely well known. It is also well known that this database contains errors, so it is not wise to cite it. But it is a terrific, FREE, tool to begin one's search and reading of texts. It also includes a section on Warring States manuscripts (for some reason, not all are listed under "Excavated texts," such as the 性自命出. But google "性自命出 ctext," and it will show up as first result). This section has not been updated for a long time, so I would not rely on it for the best up-to-date citable transcriptions.
A massive collection of Classical Chinese plaintexts, available through archive.org, here. I cannot find much information about who put this together. (The same person shares all sorts of content They may contain errors. These are all plaintexts, so very useful if you want to do data analyses or scan texts through digital tools.)
Kanripo カンリポ a rather large repository of pre-modern Chinese texts. None of which is punctuated. (I could not find references for any of these.) It was started around 2016, and there are recent updates. You can find an introduction here. Not all of the digital facsimile pages are available. For a simple search, I like the "naked" results, which allow for a qucik comparison among them without distracting interfaces.
Wuhan University Center of Bamboo and Silk. This is a database of thumbnails from bamboo strip manuscripts that I have (briefly) discussed in a piece for the Digital Orientalist, you can find it here. As of 2023, this website has. not been updated for almost a decade.
Chinese Text Initiative by the University of Virginia Library. This is antoher FREE resource, which includes the reproduction of the Book of Odes, accompained by translation by James Legge. Other corpora include the 300 Tang Poem, and pieces of literature such as the Hong Lou Meng. A good resource for teaching.
Harvard University has a research guide for databses and digital collections, with indications on which ones are freely accessible. You find it here.

Lecture RECORDINGS

In October 2021, PhD Zhou Boqun 周博群 gave two lectures on resources and methods for the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts, followed by two lectures by Prof. Imre Galambos that introduced the Dunhuang 敦煌 cave manuscripts and how to use digitized collections of these manuscripts. The recordings for all these lectures are found here, and you can also find some information and useful links on through the project that hosted these lectures, Methods in Sinology.

Prof. Nathan Hill has also been updating his Youtube channel with his lectures. Here you can find explanations on medieval Chinese dictionaries that are used for the reconstruction of Old Chinese language, as well as introductions to features of Old Chinese language.

A lecture in Chinese by Prof. Guillaume Jacques on Sino-Tibetan Historical Linguistics (for advanced learners who already master the relevant vocabulary).

TEXBOOKS

Background studies

The Cambridge Studies in Linguistics Series is overall reliable as good textbooks to study these subejcts. In particular, I use:

Historical Linguistics and Language Change, and Phonology by Roger Lass. They are both clear studies with good examples.
Historical Linguistics by Theodora Bynon.
Lexical Categories by Mark C. Baker.
Grammaticalization by Paul J. Hopper.
Minimalist Syntax by Andrew Radford.

On Chinese language

Chinese Writing by Qiu Xigui 裘锡圭. This is still the best, most comprehensive introduction in English that illustrates all the major phenomena with clear examples. Other studies often use the vocabulary presented here. The original in Chinese, 文字學概要, can serve the same purpose (learning vocabulary still used by scholars in who publish in Chinese language).
A Handbook of Old Chinese Phonology, by William Baxter 1992. This is a very lucidly and well-written book, one of the foundational texts in both Chinese and non-Chinese academic worlds. This was followed by Old Chinese. A New Reconstruction co-authored with Laurent Sagaert (2014). The comparative evidence in this second work has been more controversially assessed.
Lukáš Zádrapa has compiled a list of reference books for the Oxford Bibliographies series, in 2014.
A Phonological History of Chinese by Zhongwei Shen 沈鐘偉. This is the most recent publication in English language, issued in 2020. By a quick look, the structure of the book requires familiarity with how reconstructions work (the book proceeds chronologically, from Old Chinese to Middle Chinese, even though Old Chinese is reconstructed in reverse process, from Middle Chinese to Old Chinese). See Zav Handel's review here.