Reference
Translation Policy
These are the rules every text on this site is held to. They exist so that a reader can know exactly what they are looking at.
The rules
- From the original only. Every translation is made directly from the classical Chinese source text, which is always public-domain. We never consult, adapt or paraphrase an existing English translation.
- Readable, not literal. Classical Chinese is radically compressed. We expand implied scenes into clear literary English, and we never add plot, characters or dialogue that the original does not contain.
- Condensation is disclosed. Where a tale is abridged, an italic note at the end of the text says so.
- The original is attached. Every story carries its Chinese text (or the opening of it) in a collapsible panel, so the rendering can be checked.
- Notes are original. The cultural notes, encyclopedia entries and essays are written for this site. They are not copied from any scholarly apparatus, and any overlap with published scholarship is the overlap of facts, not of text.
- Names in pinyin, family name first. Terms of art (fox spirit, ghost, immortal, the Courts of the Dead) are kept consistent across the site and defined in the glossary.
- Errors are corrected publicly. When a mistake is confirmed, the text is fixed. Report errors via the contact page.
- Illustrations are labelled. All artwork is AI-generated for this site and captioned as such.
Why it matters
A library of this kind is only useful if it can be trusted — by casual readers, by students, and by the writers and game designers who build on it. These rules are the mechanism of that trust: they make the site's claims checkable, and its failures correctable.