The Chinese libraries: Kanripo, the Taishō canon, and a concept lexicon

20 July 2026 · Nabu news

Phase 33 brings the two great Chinese text libraries. From the Kanseki Repository: the classics, dynastic histories, masters, and literary anthologies — some 3,500 texts fetched text-by-text under a polite, resumable, catalog-driven design (the library’s first many-repo source), each citable to text, juan, and printed leaf. From CBETA: the Taishō canon and the Xuzangjing in scholarly TEI, where a passage’s identity IS the classical citation — volume, page, register, line — and the Chinese Āgamas ingested earlier now point into their canonical home. The Thesaurus Linguae Sericae adds something the library has not had before: an onomasiological concept net, three thousand concepts with twenty thousand member words, as a dictionary shelf beside the reconstruction lanes.

A crosswalk links the Kyoto Classical Chinese treebank to the very Kanripo texts it annotates, so gold morphology and source editions meet. Licensing as always: the canon-level gate holds CBETA at non-commercial and refuses its four excluded collections by name; the Kanripo organization grant is recorded verbatim with a confirmation outstanding; every discrepancy found is journaled, none papered over.