We adopt the corpus-informed approach to example sentence selections for the construction of a reference grammar. In the process, a database containing sentences that are carefully selected by linguistic experts including the full range of linguistic facts covered in an authoritative Chinese Reference Grammar is constructed and structured according to the reference grammar. A search engine system is developed to facilitate the process of finding the most typical examples the users need to study a linguistic problem or prove their hypotheses. The database can also be used as a training corpus by computational linguists to train models for Chinese word segmentation, POS tagging and sentence parsing.