Human genomics is witnessing an ongoing paradigm shift from a single reference sequence to a pangenome form but populations of Asian ancestry are underrepresented. Here, we present the first effort (Phase I) of the Chinese Pangenome Consortium (CPC) with a collection of 116 high-quality and haplotype-phased de novo assemblies based on 58 core samples representing 36 minority Chinese ethnic groups. With > 30.65× High-Fidelity long-reads sequence coverage, an average contiguity N50 > 35.63 Mb, and an average total size of 3.01 Gb, the CPC core assemblies cover ~96.54% and ~93.59% of the latest reference sequence GRCh38 and a Telomere-to-Telomere haploid assembly T2T-CHM13, respectively. Moreover, the CPC Phase I data add 189 million base pairs of euchromatic polymorphic sequence and 1,367 protein-coding gene duplications to GRCh38. We also identify from the CPC pangenome ~15.9 million small variants and ~78 thousand structural variants (SVs), of which ~6.1 million (38.0%) small variants and ~25 thousand (32.4%) SVs are not reported in a recently released pangenome reference by the Human Pangenome Reference Consortium (HPRC)
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. The CPC data demonstrate a remarkable increase in discovering novel or missing sequences when individuals are included from underrepresented minority ethnic groups, suggesting the necessity of a more comprehensive sampling effort for both CPC and HPRC.