Overview
Chinese Text Project offers a free API to access a massive digital library of pre-modern Chinese texts, including classics like the Analects and Tao Te Ching. You can retrieve chapter content, search for passages, and look up textual metadata without any API key. It is a great starting point for digital humanities projects or anyone studying classical Chinese literature.
Beginner Tip
Use the gettext operation to fetch the content of a specific text section by its CTP identifier (e.g., analects/1). Response data is returned as JSON with nested chapter and passage objects.
Measurement Record
What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.
- Request
- GET https://api.ctext.org/getstatus
- Result
- HTTP 200 · application/json · 55 bytes · compressed
- Response time
- 467 ms (median of 3) · fastest 324 ms
- Transport
- TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by Let's Encrypt
- Browser CORS
- Allowed — Access-Control-Allow-Origin: https://apisscore.com
- Served by
- Apache
- Answered
- 8 of 8 weekly checks (100%, since 2026-07-31)
- Recorded
- 2026-09-21
Fields Returned
Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.
| Field | Type | Value received |
|---|---|---|
| loggedin | string | false |
| subscriber | string | false |
Captured Response
Captured from a real request to https://api.ctext.org/getstatus on 2026-09-21. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.
{
"loggedin": "false",
"subscriber": "false"
} Implementation Example
Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.
const url = "https://ctext.org/api.pl?if=en&op=gettext&urn=urn:cts:shicai:lunyu&format=json";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data); What Can You Build?
Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.
Common Errors & Troubleshooting
Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.
Measured Score Breakdown
Live HTTP request to the API endpoint
Fully tested on Sep 21, 2026
Technical Specifications
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