BUILT IN SAN FRANCISCO + HANGZHOU
About Chinese Color Atlas
A color archive for designers, grounded in academic sourcing and Chinese cultural narrative.
Core principle
Chinese Color Atlas aims to be the academic-grade design infrastructure for Chinese traditional colors. Beyond browsing swatches, we focus on data credibility, cultural depth, and design-workflow integration. Every color carries a traceable literary citation; every hex value is cross-validated.
Data sources
zerosoul/chinese-colors
MIT license · 161 colors · names, pinyin, and family groupings
daodaolee/china-color
Based on Chinese Traditional Colors: Aesthetics from the Forbidden City · 384 colors · poetry & solar-term mapping
Tiangong Kaiwu — Zhangshi (1637)
Song Yingxing (Ming Dynasty) · public domain · 24 dye recipes
★ The Qianlong Palette
42 colors + 9 natural-dye recipes · CIE L*a*b* scientifically measured · reconstructed by Liu Jian and Wang Yehong's team at the China National Silk Museum from Imperial Household Department dye-bureau ledgers (Qianlong reign, 1736–1795).
Paper: Su Miao et al. Color Characteristics of the Qianlong Palette via Colorimetric Measurement. Journal of Textile Research, 2023, 44(03): 132–138.
DOI: 10.13475/j.fzxb.20211203107
Source book: Liu Jian, Wang Yehong. The Qianlong Palette: Research and Color Reconstruction of 17th–19th Century Textile Dyes. Hangzhou: Zhejiang University Press, 2020. ISBN 9787308201322.
Reliability standards
Color name attested in classical texts (Shuowen Jiezi, Erya, etc., independently verifiable).
Modern coinage; no direct classical antecedent established.
Public scholarly objection (e.g., Jia Xizeng et al.).
Stats
567
Total colors
24
Solar terms
295
Verified
42
Qianlong measured
Downloads · design assets
567-color bulk exports for direct integration into design and dev workflows. MIT-friendly: free for commercial use; attribution appreciated.
Complete Design Pack
Includes ASE, Procreate swatches, Figma Variables, Tailwind, CSS, DTCG tokens, AI prompts, Qianlong, and Dunhuang resources.
ASE and Procreate .swatches are generated programmatically by scripts/build-design-bundles.mjs (no Adobe/Procreate required). Figma's native .fig remains a closed binary format; until Figma publishes a spec, the .json variables import is the open alternative.
Licensing
zerosoul/chinese-colors data is MIT-licensed and free to use.
daodaolee/china-color data has no stated license; cited here for attribution only.
Tiangong Kaiwu (1637) is public domain.
Hex values themselves are uncopyrightable. Artifact imagery uses MET Open Access (CC0) and Wikimedia Commons (Forbidden City holdings).
Chinese Color Atlas © MMXXVI