ChinaTextbook: Free China Textbooks PDF Collection
ChinaTextbook is a GitHub repository that hosts free PDF copies of official Chinese math textbooks, from first grade through university-level courses, backed by 76,965 stars. Reach for it if you need a specific grade's China textbooks PDF and don't mind clicking through folders one file at a time; skip it if you wanted a searchable catalog covering every school subject, since the README only walks through math in real detail.
About the ChinaTextbook Collection
ChinaTextbook is a GitHub repo maintained by TapXWorld that mirrors official Chinese math textbook PDFs, from grade one through university courses, as free downloads. The repo description promises coverage of all primary, middle, high school, and university teaching materials, but the README itself documents only the mathematics track file by file, edition by edition.
What the Collection Covers
- ✓Primary school math for grades one through six, with separate first-semester (上册) and second-semester (下册) PDFs for every grade, using the 人教版 (People's Education Press) edition
- ✓Middle school math for 初一/初二/初三 (roughly grades 7-9), again split into first- and second-semester volumes from the same publisher
- ✓A high school math table of contents for the 人教版 A-edition, credited to editors 章建跃 and 李增沪
- ✓Four university-level math subjects: 高等数学 (Advanced Math, Tongji University 7th edition), 线性代数 (Linear Algebra), 离散数学 (Discrete Math), and 概率论 (Probability Theory)
- ✓An outbound link to 大学数学网 (dxsx.net) for more university math material beyond those four subjects
- ✓A companion tool repo, ChinaTextbook-tools, that ships a Windows executable for reassembling PDFs GitHub forced the maintainer to split
Who Benefits from This Resource?
- •Overseas Chinese parents who want their kids working through the same math sequence as classmates back in China
- •Students or teachers outside mainland China with slow or restricted access to domestic education platforms who need a GitHub-hosted copy instead
- •Anyone comparing a specific 人教版 textbook edition grade-by-grade for research, tutoring, or curriculum design
- •Self-learners or homeschoolers following the Chinese math curriculum from grade one through university math
Strengths
- ✓Covers a full vertical slice of Chinese math education, grade one through university, in one repo instead of scattered across different sites
- ✓Textbook editions are named precisely — 人教版, Tongji University 7th edition for advanced math — so you can match a PDF to the exact edition a student is actually using
- ✓Free and watermark-free, directly addressing the README's complaint about resellers charging for stamped copies of public materials
- ✓76,965 stars and 17,388 forks show real, sustained pickup rather than a one-off share
Handling Large Files
- △Files over 50MB are split into 35MB chunks (named .pdf.1, .pdf.2, and so on) because GitHub rejects single uploads over 100MB and warns on anything past 50MB — grabbing a full-size textbook means collecting several parts before you can open it
- △The only merge tool provided is mergePDFs-windows-amd64.exe. Windows only. The README documents no macOS or Linux merge path
- △The license field on the repo is blank ("?"), so there's no stated legal basis for redistributing these copyrighted textbook PDFs
- △The description promises "all primary, middle, high school, and university" materials, but the README itself only walks through the math track in detail — other subjects aren't documented the same way
Other Ways to Access Textbooks
Common Questions
ChinaTextbook currently documents math in detail: primary school (grades 1-6), middle school (初一-初三), a high school table of contents, and four university subjects — advanced math, linear algebra, discrete math, and probability theory. The repo's description also claims broader all-level coverage.
GitHub rejects single-file uploads over 100MB and warns on anything past 50MB, so ChinaTextbook splits any textbook PDF larger than 50MB into 35MB chunks, each saved with a .pdf.1, .pdf.2 suffix.
Download mergePDFs-windows-amd64.exe from the ChinaTextbook-tools releases page, put it in the same folder as the split .pdf.1/.pdf.2 files, and double-click it — the README says it reassembles the parts automatically. Only a Windows build is provided.
ChinaTextbook's README points readers with fast mainland China connections toward tchMaterial-parser, a separate open-source tool that pulls the same materials straight from the source instead of this GitHub mirror.
ChinaTextbook's maintainer built it for two groups: people in China who'd otherwise buy the same PDFs from resellers selling watermarked copies, and overseas Chinese families who want their kids to keep studying the domestic curriculum.
ChinaTextbook's README asks for donations through a QR code in its "支持我" section and links out to a Telegram community for updates — no other funding or sponsorship channel is documented.
Who should try it — and who should skip
Try ChinaTextbook if you're an overseas parent, a self-learner, or a tutor who needs a specific grade of Chinese math textbook as a free PDF and you don't mind digging through nested GitHub folders and running a merge tool yourself. Skip it if you need subjects beyond math documented in detail, a proper search page, or a clear license before redistributing anything.