Against the background that the top-level semantic framework of Chinese traditional culture is not comprehensive and unified, this study aims to preserve and disseminate cultural heritage information about Chinese traditional culture through the development of a domain ontology which is constructed from ancient books. A combination of top-down and bottom-up approaches was used to construct the ontology for Chinese traditional culture (CTCO). An investigation of historians’ needs, and LDA topic clustering model were conducted, understanding the specific needs of historians, collecting the topic, concepts and relationships. CIDOC CRM was reused to construct the basic framework of CTCO. Ontology structure and function were adopted to evaluate the effectiveness of CTCO. Evaluation results show that the ontology meets all the quality criteria of OntoMetrics, and the experts agreed on content representation (average score = 4.30). CTCO contributes to the organization of traditional Chinese culture and the construction of related databases. The study also forms a common path and puts forward proposals for the construction of domain ontology, which has great social relevance.