Chinese Text Initiative University of Virginia Library George
Mason University The Chinese Text Initiative (CTI) is an ongoing
effort to make texts of the classical Chinese literary canon
widely available. CTI is actually a collection of sites, each
centered upon a specific text—most of which are from the Tang
period (618-907) and earlier. At present, only six texts are
available; however, the editors plan to add additional works.
Although most of the present sites are primarily aimed at
students of the Chinese language or specialists in Chinese
literature, four of the texts are accompanied by partial or
complete English translations and may be of interest to world
history teachers. The first is 300 Tang Poems (Tang shi sanbai
shou, 1763), an 18th-century anthology of Tang poems by Sun Zhu.
Sun intended his anthology to be used as a literary primer that
would simultaneously serve the didactic purpose of cultivating
character. Containing representative works in all the classical
poetic forms and well-known wor