The Hunt for a Chinese Lorem Ipsum

Lorem ipsum according to Wikipedia:

In publishing and graphic design, lorem ipsum is a filler text commonly used to demonstrate the graphic elements of a document or visual presentation. Replacing meaningful content with placeholder text allows viewers to focus on graphic aspects such as font, typography, and page layout without being distracted by the content. It also reduces the need for the designer to come up with meaningful text, as they can instead use quickly-generated lorem ipsum.

The lorem ipsum text is typically a scrambled section of De finibus bonorum et malorum, a 1st-century BC Latin text by Cicero, with words altered, added, and removed to make it nonsensical, improper Latin.

So what’s the Chinese equivalent?

It seems there’s no agreed upon standard text, so here’s what I found:

• The most commonly referenced one is Richy Li’s Chinese Lorem Ipsum, which spouts dummy text of various word counts.
• The most fully-featured is Handino’s Moretext, which allows you to choose texts based on Chinese poets, Twitter or the Apple Daily newspaper.
• But both of those are traditional Chinese.* The only simplified Chinese one I’ve found is from tech shop 关于电商开源.
• One Quora user even said his “Chinese graphic designer” friend just pastes one sentence over and over again, which is ridiculous.

* Of course, you can also machine translate traditional Chinese to simplified, but that would make you do one extra step of work!