A quiet workbench for
ancient manuscript research.
Twelve focused utilities for bronze glyph lookup, classical text punctuation, radical analysis and calendar conversion — every tool runs in your browser against free, keyless, public data.
Trace a character across five script stages — from Shang oracle bone through Han clerical to modern regular script — in a single query.
What is paleography, and who is this for?
Paleography is the study of the material forms of writing — how characters were carved, cast, brushed and printed across three millennia. This site brings together the small, practical tools that scholarship rarely bothers to package.
Curious readers who want to see how a character actually looked in the Shang and Zhou, without wading through a library.
Graduate students and independent scholars needing quick, transparent lookup, gloss and citation utilities.
OCR, punctuation and standardisation practice for those training on classical text pipelines.
Four scenarios, twelve tools
Character Recognition & Analysis
Identify, compare and interpret ancient glyphs across bronze and seal scripts.
Document & Text Processing
Punctuate, gloss and reformat classical texts for readable, searchable output.
Glyph Evolution & Knowledge
Look up radicals, stroke sequences and classical function-word usage.
Auxiliary Research Utilities
Supporting utilities for citation, calendar, geography and academic formatting.
Frequently used tools
A rolling selection of the most practical utilities in the current release.
Look up bronze-script (Jinwen) forms and their modern equivalents.
Compare orthographic variants and interchangeable characters (異體字 / 通假字).
Auto-segment and punctuate unpunctuated classical Chinese passages.
Break a character down into its Shuowen radical and stroke sequence.
Find classical passages containing a target character or phrase.
Convert reign-year dates to the modern Gregorian calendar.
Release notes
- 2026-07-10Retired three demo-only utilities; every remaining tool works against real bundled data.
- 2026-07-01Bronze glyph index expanded to 4,120 entries; Eastern Zhou coverage improved.
- 2026-06-18Punctuation engine v3.2 — better handling of parallel prose (駢文).
- 2026-05-22CHGIS geographical name index refreshed against 2025 open release.
Start with a short guide
Read the About page for a plain-language overview of what these tools do, or jump straight into a beginner-friendly utility.