A.Codex Sinica is a free, browser-based workbench of small utilities for the study of ancient Chinese manuscripts and paleography. It groups twelve focused tools — bronze glyph lookup, classical text punctuation, radical decomposition, calendar conversion and so on — under one calm, ad-free interface.

A.Amateur paleography enthusiasts, humanities researchers, and anyone learning to read pre-modern Chinese texts. No prior background in classical Chinese is required to try the tools; the About page has a short orientation for newcomers.

A.Yes. There is no paid tier, no free trial, and no plan to introduce one. The site is maintained by a small team of enthusiasts and its running costs are covered by the maintainers.

A.No. Every tool works without registration. There is nothing to log in to and nothing personal is stored on the server.

A.No tool on the site requires an API key, a subscription, or any credentials. All computation happens locally in your browser against bundled open data.

A.Any modern desktop or tablet browser released in the last two years — Chrome, Edge, Firefox, Safari — works. Mobile browsers work but the workbenches are laid out for tablet-and-up screen widths.

A.The first load requires an internet connection. Once loaded, most tools will continue to function on the current tab because their reference data is bundled with the page.

A.The tools are transparent, rule-based assistants — not oracles. Punctuation, gloss and tone analysis are meant to give you a first-pass draft that you can refine against printed references. Never cite a tool output as a primary source.

A.We recently retired three utilities (oracle-bone image recognition, ancient OCR, and the five-stage evolution timeline) because their outputs were either heuristic demos or Unicode placeholders rather than real scholarship. We prefer twelve honest tools to fifteen that overstate what they do.

A.Bundled corpora and indices are drawn from openly licensed sources including the Chinese Text Project, Academia Sinica's open data releases, the chinese-poetry dataset (MIT), the CHGIS place-name index, and public-domain classical reference works. Each tool's Principle section names its data source.

A.No. Analysis runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter into a tool is sent to our servers, and we do not log tool inputs.

A.For most utilities the bundled corpus is a curated selection sufficient for the tool's purpose. For serious research you should always cross-check against a printed critical edition.

A.New long-form articles are published roughly every two to four weeks. The archive is on the Journal page and each post is searchable by title, tag or keyword.

A.Yes — corrections to bundled data, additional glyph entries, and long-form journal contributions are all welcome. See the Contact page for how to reach the maintainers.

A.Journal text is available for non-commercial reuse with attribution and a link back to the article. Bundled datasets retain their original licences; see the Principle section of each tool.

A.No third-party trackers, no advertising, no analytics scripts that identify individual visitors. The full policy is on the Privacy page.

A.Both are linked in the site footer. They are written in plain English and describe exactly what the site does and does not collect.