Digital tools unlock ancient texts

As Xu Heng, a 22-year-old agronomy student at Henan University, examined a scanned page from an ancient Chinese text on his computer screen, he paused over several characters that had become difficult to decipher because of centuries of wear and damaged printing.

He was working with Shidian Guji, an online ancient-text database that uses artificial intelligence to analyze scanned books before human volunteers review and correct the results.

By the time Xu began his work, the system had already done much of the initial processing: recognizing the text, adding punctuation and dividing the passage into paragraphs. His role was to check what the machine could not fully understand.

"AI-powered tools like Shidian Guji have made ancient texts much easier to read," Xu said. "Readers can zoom in on images of the original pages and compare them directly with the digital text, without having to repeatedly flip through bulky printed volumes."

Across China, a growing number of volunteers like Xu are taking part in digital preservation projects that combine AI-assisted text recognition with human proofreading. These efforts are helping make ancient Chinese classics more accessible to researchers, students and the general public.

Shidian Guji is one of the best-known platforms. The free online database was jointly developed by ByteDance and the Research Center for Digital Humanities of Peking University (PKUDH) as part of a public welfare initiative for ancient book preservation.

Since its launch in October 2022, the platform has expanded rapidly from several hundred titles to nearly 70,000 ancient books now available online. According to ByteDance, the database receives more than 2.4 million visitors each month.

The platform's development has been driven by a large and active volunteer community. More than 60,000 people have signed up to participate in proofreading projects, most of them university students. In 2025, volunteers helped complete preliminary proofreading of about 1.5 billion Chinese characters across roughly 20,000 ancient books.

For Xu, the platform offered something he had long been looking for: a practical way to read and work with classical Chinese texts.

Xu first became interested in ancient Chinese literature in middle school, but for years he struggled to find a reading platform that provided both extensive resources and easy access. That changed in 2024, when he discovered Shidian Guji.

"Many rare books are difficult to buy, and library copies are not always available for borrowing," he said. "But with Shidian Guji, readers can use scanned images, searchable texts and comparison tools to trace references and compare different passages."

However, proofreading ancient texts is far from a simple process of clicking through corrections. Many classical Chinese texts contain variant characters, damaged pages, irregular page layouts and punctuation problems that require knowledge of both language and historical context.

Zheng Zhenyu, a specialist in ancient-text digitization, joined Shidian Guji in 2023 while looking for a more effective optical character recognition (OCR) tool to support his own research.

"At the time, I was using another paid platform, but the overall experience was not satisfactory," he said.

Zheng later joined Shidian Guji's advanced proofreading teams, working on projects including Sibu Congkan (Collectanea of the Four Categories), a major compilation of classical Chinese literature, and Yongle Dadian (Yongle Encyclopedia), one of the largest encyclopedic works in Chinese history.

Through this work, he found the platform's OCR capabilities to be a significant improvement over similar tools he had used before.