In the summer of 2006, several of us in Beijing launched a project called “Adso Textbook”. The goal was producing an archive of manually-annotated selections from classic Chinese literature. I’m proud of the results, and happy that the readings are back online as part of a freshly-redesigned NewsinChinese.
That’s the other big news. After about a half-year hiatus, NIC is back online and hopefully improved as well. I’m still tweaking the site, but am happier with this version than the old one. The backend of articles isn’t updated as frequently as it was before, but the articles are all fully annotated in advance this time around, making it much more convenient to view full-text news.
As for the selections from stories, my two favourites are Dream of the Red Chamber and Lu Xun’s A Little Incident. My favourite poem on the site is So Gently I Go. The selection from Dream of the Red Chamber is particularly cool for making late Qing prose accessible and acting as a functional tutorial for non-modern texts. Once you have the basics down, it *is* possible to make headway in the book without smashing your head against a wall.
W00h00! thanks much for NIC!