Chinese shares with Sanskrit and Hebrew the privilege of being one of the longest continuous literary traditions. The antiquity of each of these traditions has murky origins that are to some degree shaped by later construction, additions, and editing. Each culture, however, never lost sight of its early texts, which served as reference points as the traditions transformed over millennia. In the course of millennia and spreading over large geographical regions, Chinese and Sanskrit in particular amassed a vast corpus of literary texts, which are still read and studied.

Apart from inscriptions, which survive because of their durable media, the received tradition of Chinese literature begins in the first quarter of the first millennium bc and has continued with a steadily increasing volume of production. Students in primary schools all over China still read selections of texts from antiquity and the medieval period, though heavily annotated. Paper, which proved to be the most successful medium for the written word, gradually came into general use probably in the first and second centuries ad. Paper could not compare to parchment or vellum for durability, but neither did the production of a book require whole herds or flocks; like its equally inexpensive competitors, papyrus and palm leaves, paper enabled levels of circulation that made literary texts more than isolated treasures. China, moreover, had state-sponsored printing by the tenth century and a flourishing commercial printing industry by the late eleventh century.