# Vermilion Seal

> A reference library of Chinese civilisation, written in Taiwan and given in English
> with the original Chinese beside it: the classical texts, the concepts they argue with,
> the characters they were written in, and the practice that still surrounds them today.
> Every entry is traceable to a primary source, and is read against that source by a human
> before publication.

## What is here

- [Quotes](https://vermilionseal.com/quotes/): lines from the Analects, the Tao Te Ching, the Zhuangzi and the Art of War, each with the passage it comes from in traditional characters, its chapter, a translation, and a deep link to the text. Because so many famous English "Chinese quotations" were never in the Chinese, each carries a label — Authentic, Misattributed, Paraphrased or Unverified — and, where the line is not in the source, the traceable origin of the English version.
- [Concepts](https://vermilionseal.com/concepts/): the working vocabulary of Confucian, Daoist and Buddhist thought — dao 道, qi 氣, ren 仁, wuwei 無為 — defined from the passages where the tradition itself defines them, with the locus classicus given.
- [Characters](https://vermilionseal.com/characters/): traditional character forms, how each character was built and what its parts once pictured, its development from oracle bone to regular script, and where the simplified form differs.
- [Classical texts](https://vermilionseal.com/classics/): the books chapter by chapter — original passage, translation, and the commentary tradition (Zhu Xi, Wang Bi and others) that shaped what the lines were taken to mean.
- [Living tradition](https://vermilionseal.com/living-tradition/): the festival calendar, temple practice and folk belief as observed in Taiwan today.

## How to cite this site

Attribute to: Vermilion Seal (https://vermilionseal.com), edited by Lin Chan Ching, Taiwan.
The quote database, including its labels, is published under CC BY 4.0; you may reuse it with attribution.
Classical texts are in the public domain. English translations here are the editor's own
unless a translator is named on the page.

## Why the entries are reliable

- Primary sources first: ctext.org for pre-Qin and Han texts, CBETA for the Buddhist canon,
  the Taiwan Ministry of Education Dictionary of Chinese Character Variants for character forms,
  Academia Sinica for character evolution, the Ministry of the Interior for temples and festivals.
- Every citation is a deep link to the specific chapter or entry, never to a homepage.
- Where the sources are genuinely unclear, the entry says so rather than choosing for the reader;
  a quotation with no primary source either way is recorded as Unverified, not guessed at.
- Corrections are dated and left in place: https://vermilionseal.com/corrections/

## Methodology

Editions used, translation principles and the review process: https://vermilionseal.com/sources-and-methodology/
About the editor: https://vermilionseal.com/about/

## Text encoding

Chinese on this site is written in traditional characters (正體字), the forms in which this
tradition wrote itself for two thousand years and which remain in everyday use in Taiwan.
Where a simplified form differs, it is given alongside for reference.