The Classics, The Great Novels and Lu Xun Anthology in Traditional Chinese

To conclude my recent sharing spree, here are some Chinese texts ready for the Pleco Reader. There is a relative paucity of reading material written with full-form (traditional) characters, and this collection hopefully relieves that to some extent.

This is all based on sources available online, some of which are already linked from this forum. I didn't keep track of which file came from where but many of them definitely originate from the PanLogic Wiki. In any case, I didn't type them up myself, and I wouldn't want to claim any credit for that.

What I did:
  • Download all the available versions (generally there are always a few, and they can differ quite a lot), compare them, and choose the one that looks "best" as the starting point.
  • Convert the files to UTF-8 (with BOM), Windows (CR+LF) line breaks.
  • Convert the text to full-form characters using OpenCC, profile s2tw.json ("Taiwan Standard," the few differences seem to be using 裡 instead of 裏, etc.).
  • Apply some regular expression-based optimizations (think "search and replace" on steroids) to, in particular, separate the text into paragraphs, separate the paragraphs with double newlines, remove any indentation, unwrap the text, standardize the punctuation (making it full-width), remove any unnecessary newlines and other gibberish.
  • Add an opening note to each text, giving some introduction to it in English (generally taken from the first paragraph of the Wikipedia article, edited to keep only the most relevant facts, sometimes up to three paragraphs if the story behind it is more interesting). Beyond that, there's only Chinese. (Not included for Lu Xun's texts.)
  • Have a quick glance at each text to make sure the final version looks fine, making some cosmetic changes by hand where necessary.
What's included:
  • 古典典籍 The Classics:三字經 The Three Character Classic、千字文 The Thousand Character Classic、唐詩 The Three Hundred Tang Poems、四書 The Four Books of Confucian Philosophy:中庸 The Doctrine of the Mean 、大學 The Great Learning、孟子 The Mencius、論語 The Analects、孝經 The Classic of Filial Piety、百家姓 The Hundred Family Surnames、莊子 The Zhuangzi、道德經 Daodejing
  • 大小說名著 The Great Novels:三國演義 Romance of the Three Kingdoms、儒林外史 The Scholars、水滸傳 Water Margin (Outlaws of the Marsh)、紅樓夢 Dream of the Red Chamber、西遊記 Journey to the West、金瓶梅 The Plum in the Golden Vase (The Golden Lotus)
  • 魯迅 Lu Xun:Nearly complete anthology 三閒集、且介亭雜文、且介亭雜文末編、且介亭雜文附集、中國小說史略、二心集、僞自由書、南腔北調集、古籍序跋集、吶喊、墳、彷徨、故事新編、文序跋集、朝花夕拾、準風月談、漢文學史綱要、熱風、而已集、舊體詩集註(六十一首 )、花邊文學、華蓋集、華蓋集續編、華蓋集續編的續編、野草、集外集、集外集拾遺、集外集拾遺補編
  • Bonus:差不多先生傳-胡適 Mr Chabuduo by Hu Shi
Preview: 三字經 The Three Character Classic
The Three Character Classic (三字經) or Trimetric Classic is one of the Chinese classic texts. It was probably written in the 13th century during the Song dynasty and is attributed to Wang Yinglin (王應麟, 1223–1296) or Ou Shizi (區適子, 1234-1324).

The work is not one of the traditional six Confucian classics, but rather the embodiment of Confucianism suitable for teaching young children. Until the latter part of the 1800s, it served as a child's first formal education at home. The text is written in triplets of characters for easy memorization. With illiteracy common for most people at the time, the oral tradition of reciting the classic ensured its popularity and survival through the centuries.

With the short and simple text arranged in three-character verses, children learned many common characters, grammar structures, elements of Chinese history and the basis of Confucian morality, especially filial piety and respect for elders (the Five Relationships in Chinese society).

人之初 性本善 性相近 習相遠 苟不教 性乃遷
教之道 貴以專 昔孟母 擇鄰處 子不學 斷機杼
竇燕山 有義方 教五子 名俱揚 養不教 父之過
(...)
Note: It's possible there is some error somewhere that is not immediately noticeable (for example, there might be a character or a sentence missing here or there). I haven't read through these files yet and only plan to do so later, so please use all of it at your own peril. If you spot (and fix) any errors, please post the updated version back in this thread so that others can benefit from the improvements too. The collection is split into several files to overcome the attachment size limit. Enjoy!

External Download Link
(Hopefully works for everyone; couldn't get the attachments to upload properly here, sorry.)
 
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