Read the books that shaped the Chinese character.
四书 · The Four Books
The Confucian core. Confucius — teaching in the fifth century BCE, before China was China — shaped the civilization as deeply as Jesus shaped the West. His students' notes became the Lunyu (Analects); his follower Mencius extended the work into ethics, learning, and rule. Da Xue and Zhong Yong are short on-ramps — a few pages each on how to learn and how to stay centered; Lunyu and Mengzi are the heavy hitters.
道家 · Daoist Classics
Confucianism's complement and reply. Where Confucius asks how to live in the world, Daoism asks why you'd want to — the Daodejing in compressed riddles, Zhuangzi in wild parables, Liezi in gentler tales.
佛经 · Buddhist Sutras
The one import in this library. Buddhism reached China from India around the first century CE, traveling the Silk Road with monks and a Sanskrit corpus that was translated into Chinese over the centuries that followed — a rendering effort so large it reshaped the Chinese language itself. The Diamond and Heart sutras are the two that anchored Chan (Japanese: Zen).
五经 · The Five Classics
The older canon the Four Books were an on-ramp to — poetry (Shi Jing), oracles (Zhou Yi), ritual (Li Ji), and history (Chun Qiu and its commentary, Zuozhuan). These are the sources Confucius himself taught from.
儒家诸子 · Confucian Masters
Confucian philosophers outside the Song-era Four Books canon. Xunzi — the third of the great early Confucians, after Confucius and Mencius — is the one carried here. He argued against Mencius that human nature is bad (性恶) and only the deliberate artifice of ritual (礼) makes us decent. Zhu Xi's Song compilers built the Four Books around Mencius and left Xunzi out on exactly this point, so he stands in a peer section, not the core.
诗词 · Poetry
The verse tradition beside the Shi Jing's northern odes — Qu Yuan's laments in the Chu Ci (the southern source, tier A alongside the Shi Jing), then the Tang poets at their peak. Both are anthologies, not single works: the Chu Ci gathered Qu Yuan and his imitators; the Tang 300 collects Li Bai, Du Fu, Wang Wei, and dozens more. Future verse (Song ci, Yuefu) lands here as it ships.
四大名著 · Four Great Classical Novels
The closed canon of Chinese vernacular fiction, four Ming- and Qing-era novels every Chinese reader knows as a set. Sanguo Yanyi (Three Kingdoms) and Xiyou Ji (Journey to the West) are carried now; Shui Hu Zhuan (Water Margin) and Hong Lou Meng (Dream of the Red Chamber) are the two still to come. The slots are reserved in canonical order below.
兵政 · Statecraft & Strategy
On war, law, and the holding of power. Sunzi on the strategy of force; Han Feizi on law (法) as the reliable corrective for bad human nature — Xunzi's premise pursued past ritual to coercion (see Confucian Masters above).
蒙学 · Primers
Children's primers — the verse textbooks a child memorized before touching the classics. San Zi Jing packs a Confucian worldview into three-character lines; Qian Zi Wen is a thousand non-repeating characters in rhyme, written as a literacy copybook for a prince. They were the front door to the rest of this library.
参考 · Reference
Not a classic text but the project's own reference layer. The Chengyu Catalog sits over the rest of the library: roughly a thousand idioms, each linked back to the line where it was coined when that source ships here — so a reader on 见贤思齐 jumps to Lunyu 4:22. It grows as more classical texts are ingested.