Every Chinese word on this site is written in traditional characters — 正體字, the “orthodox forms”. This page explains why, without the argument becoming a political shouting match.
The short version
When you read 學 rather than 学, or 禮 rather than 礼, you are reading the forms in which these texts have been printed and studied for most of their transmitted history. The characters looked different again in Confucius’s own day — seal and clerical scripts came first, and every age’s hands differ — but the traditional set preserves distinctions between characters that the texts depend on. For a site whose entire claim is fidelity to the source, giving those distinctions up would be a small betrayal repeated on every page.
What simplification actually did
Character simplification in the 1950s and 60s did several different things at once, and they are worth separating:
- Adopted existing cursive or vulgar forms — many simplified characters were already in handwritten use for centuries. This part is uncontroversial.
- Reduced component complexity — fewer strokes, at some cost to the visible logic of the character.
- Merged distinct characters — this is the part that matters for reading old texts. 後 (after) and 后 (queen) became one form; 髮 (hair) and 發 (to send out) became one form; 乾, 幹 and 榦 collapsed together. Information that the older script kept apart is gone, and has to be recovered from context.
That last category is why classical scholarship, including in mainland China, still works with traditional forms. It is not a matter of taste.
How the reform unfolded — including the Republic of China’s own short-lived simplified list of 1935 — is told in why did China simplify Chinese characters? For a learner deciding between the two scripts, see traditional vs simplified Chinese.
What this site does not claim
Simplified characters are not “wrong Chinese”, and the people who write them are not writing a lesser language. Literacy in the People’s Republic is not in question here. The claim is narrower and, I think, harder to argue with: for reading and quoting classical texts, the traditional forms carry distinctions the simplified set does not, and this site is entirely about classical texts.
Where a character’s simplified form differs, entries in the character library give both. If you learned Chinese in simplified characters, nothing here is closed to you.
If you are choosing a character for a tattoo
Use the traditional form, check it in the character library, and read the warning note on the entry. The most common failure is not choosing the wrong meaning — it is choosing a character that is correct but reads oddly on a person, or a form that is a font artefact rather than a real character. Both are permanent.
