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How to download a big PGN chess database from Baidu Pan (no Chinese account)

Updated 23 September 2026 · 5 min read

Someone on a chess forum, a Telegram study group or a Discord server posts "the whole collection, 13,000 PGNs" and drops a Baidu Pan share link with four characters next to it. You click, and Baidu asks you to install an app and sign in with a Chinese phone number.

This post is what to do instead, and — just as useful — what to do with the pile of files once it lands on your disk.

Why chess collections end up on Baidu Pan

PGN archives are awkward to host. A serious study collection is tens of thousands of small text files: tactics sets, opening trees, annotated master games, engine analysis dumps. Free file hosts hate that shape — thousands of tiny files, several gigabytes total, downloaded by a handful of people a month. Chinese cloud drives give away terabytes, so collections get uploaded there and the link travels: forum, then Telegram, then a Reddit comment two years later.

The link is a pan.baidu.com share address followed by a line that reads 提取码 and four characters. 提取码 means extraction code — no secret, whoever shared the link publishes it right next to it. Without those four characters Baidu will not even show you the file list.

The wall

Baidu Pan is free to use and hard to use from outside China, in this order:

• Registration wants a mainland Chinese phone number. Foreign numbers are rejected at the SMS step.
• Even with an account, free downloads are throttled. We measure 50–70 KB/s no matter how fast your line is. A 6 GB collection at that speed is a full day.
• Folders push you into the Netdisk client. The web page refuses anything past a few hundred megabytes, and the client is Chinese-only with ads.
• Old workarounds are gone. PanDownload was shut down in 2020; the "revived" builds you find today are either dead or malware.

Three ways to get the collection

1. Buy Baidu SVIP yourself

Makes sense if you pull Chinese links every week. You need a phone number Baidu accepts, and payment through Alipay or WeChat Pay. Roughly ¥30–40 a month. Then the client downloads at full speed, 15–19 MB/s in our tests.

For one chess archive it is a lot of setup.

2. Ask someone in China

Works for one file, but they still have to re-upload it somewhere you can reach. For a 6 GB folder that is its own afternoon.

3. Use a fetch service

A service that already has a premium account saves the share into its own drive, downloads it at full speed, and hands you a normal HTTPS link. That is what we do at BaiduFast: paste the link and the 4-character code, and you see the exact size and price before anything is fetched. Files under 150MB are free, three a day. Above that it is $0.79 for the first GB and $0.49 per extra GB, with a cap per size — a 6 GB collection is about $3.30, paid once, no subscription.

Folders arrive as one ZIP with the structure intact, which matters here: a PGN collection is worthless if the folder tree gets flattened and you end up with 13,000 files in one directory.

Full disclosure: BaiduFast is our own service. The link checker is free either way — chess links get passed around for years, and plenty of them are dead by the time they reach you.

Check the link is still alive first

Do this before anything else. Chess collections circulate for a long time, and the original uploader may have deleted the share years ago. Paste the link into the checker and you will know in a few seconds whether it still exists, whether it needs a code, and how big it is. If Baidu says the share expired, no service on earth can fetch it — ask whoever posted it for a fresh link.

What you actually get: 13,000 files, now what?

A real example we fetched recently: 6 GB, 13,230 files, arranged as a study tree — 2 learn/ with tactics sets like Bain — Chess Tactics for Students, annotated collections such as Reversing and Forwarding the Tactics of Bobby Fischer, plus the occasional stray .py script from whoever built the set.

Three things worth knowing once it is on your disk:

Merge before you import. Most GUIs choke on thousands of separate files. pgn-extract is the standard tool:

pgn-extract -o merged.pgn *.pgn

Import into a real database, not a folder. ChessBase, SCID vs. PC and Lichess Study all read PGN. SCID converts to its own format and searches by position instantly, which is the point of having the collection at all — searching 13,000 loose files by opening or player name is hopeless.

Expect duplicates. Collections that travel for years accumulate the same games from several sources. pgn-extract -D drops duplicates; on the archive above it removed a noticeable share of the games.

Frequently asked

Do I need the 4-character code? Only if the sharer set one. If your link ends in ?pwd=xxxx, the code is already in it.

Is downloading a PGN collection legal? Chess moves themselves are facts and not copyrightable, which is why game databases circulate freely. Annotations, books and commentary are a different matter — those belong to their authors. Only download what you have the right to.

Can I get just part of the collection? Yes, if you only need one folder out of a large archive — message us with the link and the folder name and we will fetch just that part instead of the whole 6 GB.

Does this work for Quark links too? Yes. Chinese chess groups are moving to Quark (夸克网盘) the same way everyone else is; the same box takes pan.quark.cn links.

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Last checked: September 2026. Read next: Baidu Pan download in 2026 — every method that still works · Quark Pan vs Baidu Pan from outside China