10 · CHANGELOG

Changelog

This site is updated in small, frequent steps: new material, corrections, more language editions, changes to how things are presented. This log records substantive changes to content — additions, corrections, restructuring — by date, so that anyone citing the site can check which version a given statement belongs to. Purely cosmetic tweaks and deployment work are not listed individually. For change-by-change detail see the GitHub repository commit history (public, timestamped); each past version can also be verified through the Internet Archive snapshots.

This page last updated: 5 October 2026

Current version v1.5.0 · Persistent identifier: · Full-site archive: archive.org · RSS feed

5 October 2026

New Press Centre page; Digital Archive gains a filter; Traditional-Chinese interface wording fixed

Legend position — on the Corrections, Research and Press pages the evidence legend had been placed in the dark page header, unlike the Wisdom and other pages; it now sits under the heading of the first content section, on the paper background, like the Wisdom page. All eight editions.
Evidence-strength labels — following the standard of the Wisdom and other pages, all three pages (Corrections and Disputed Points, Research Agenda and Data Downloads, Press Centre) now open with the five-tier evidence legend (first-hand / physical / independent / biographical / unverified), the same wording as the Life & Era page. Corrections: the “Basis” column is tiered by the kind of basis (workplace obituary = independent; originals, copyright pages, close-up photographs = physical; his own oral-history footage and Chen Tinglong’s own text = first-hand; family explanations and family audio checks = family material); in the disputes ledger the “current assessment” column is tiered (confirmed by physical documents or the obituary = physical or independent; competing accounts left unreconciled = unverified) and the first four quick-reference lines are tiered. Research agenda: each of the 15 open questions shows its status (mostly unverified; the Jiamusi item single-source; the to-be-collected item to be verified). Press Centre: legend added at the top; the fact sheet was already tiered item by item. All eight editions.
Press Centre (new page) — for journalists, editors and curators: a short and a long standard biography; a fact sheet of nine items, each with its evidence tier and the page that holds it (matters with competing accounts are left out); writing notes (do not write “first” or “only”, how to give the age at death, easily mis-stated names and titles); notes on images and footage (the site does not currently offer a downloadable press-image pack, the ownership of each collection image is in the Digital Archive, and footage needs separate permission); citation format and contact. Reached from the “Exhibitions & Research” menu, below “Research & data”. All eight editions; included in site search and the sitemap.
Digital Archive filter — the Digital Archive page gains a filter bar: by keyword, type (manuscripts, photographs, certificates, clippings, books), evidence tier, status (held or licensed / to be collected) and date range, with a count of matches; front-end only, the tables themselves are unchanged. All eight editions.
Traditional-Chinese interface wording — seven Traditional-Chinese pages (1959, Digital Archive, Community, 37-page manuscript, 1982, Singapore, Story) were marked lang="zh-TW" while the rest use zh-Hant, so their contents bar, collapse buttons and mobile folding fell back to Simplified wording; they now all use the Traditional wording.

4 October 2026

New “Corrections and Disputed Points” page; changelog gains a version header and a feed; teaching pages can be printed to PDF

Evidence labels corrected — under this site’s own rule, first-person material from a direct disciple or the family is “first-hand”, not “independent source” (independent means a third party unconnected with the family and the circle of disciples). Accordingly: on the Mapo Tofu page Liu Zihua’s account of the World Master Chef ceremony is now “first-hand”, and the family recollection is labelled “family material”; Chen Tinglong’s writing on the Lantern Chicken page, “Liu Zihua’s article corroborates” on the Camphor-Tea Duck page, the two “disciple’s oral account” entries and Liu Zihua’s own account on the Life and Lineage pages are likewise re-tiered; Liu Zihua’s retelling of Zhou Enlai’s inspection and the “second-hand compilation” on the Craft page move to the biographical tier. Six footnote tags whose colour did not match their label were fixed, and the Fuqi Feipian page’s 1984 booking-slip line (confirmed by the physical stub) no longer says “biographical account”. All eight editions; the termbase tier table is updated.
Licence wording unified — the Craft page said CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 while the About page said CC BY-NC-SA 4.0; on the project lead’s confirmation CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 prevails, and the Craft page now permits non-commercial reproduction, citation and adaptation, with adaptations shared under the same licence and no commercial use. All eight editions.
Changelog page navigation — the changelog page’s own menu lacked the “Corrections” entry; added in all eight editions.
Image proportions — the thumbnails in the Digital Archive (the full manuscript, “1959: Before and After the Move to Beijing”, the certificate display) and in the Singapore footage exhibition had been forced into a 3:4 crop that clashed with the pages’ height attributes, so they appeared stretched, cropped and uneven; every image now keeps its own proportions and is shown whole. All eight editions.
Navigation — the “Corrections” and “Research & data” entries moved from the “About & Join” menu to the “Exhibitions & Research” menu, below “News”. All eight editions.
Research Agenda and Data Downloads (new page) — for researchers and teachers: (1) a scholarly chronology (the 33 timeline entries of the Life & Era page, each keeping its evidence label, with entries that carry competing accounts or open questions flagged automatically from keywords); (2) 15 questions the site says are still open (current accounts and what the site says is still needed); (3) data downloads: the chronology as CSV, a press and bibliography list as CSV (every link entry on the News page), the names of the 16 lesson-page dishes in eight languages, the collection register, the fixity manifest and the IIIF manifest of the 37-page manuscript. The chronology and the list are exported from the pages themselves (tools/gen_research_data.py) and checked against them by CI before release. Reached from the “About & Join” menu. All eight editions; included in site search and the sitemap.
Corrections and Disputed Points (new page) — what was scattered across the Changelog and the About page is now in tables: 21 factual corrections (earlier wording, current wording, basis), 15 disagreements still unresolved (the competing accounts and the current assessment), 8 quick-reference lines for writing copy and exhibition labels, plus the handling principles and how to report an error. Reached from the “About & Join” menu. It is a re-arrangement, not new source material; where it differs from the Changelog or the About page, those take precedence. All eight editions; included in site search and the sitemap.
Changelog version header and feed — the changelog now opens with the current version (v1.5.0), the persistent identifier (Zenodo DOI), the full-site archive (archive.org) and an RSS link; a new feed.xml is regenerated every time an entry is written and checked against the changelog by CI before release.
Print / Save as PDF — the Teaching Resources page and the 16 single-dish lesson pages have a “Print / Save as PDF” button; printing drops navigation, search and carousel, uses black on white and expands all tabs, with the page address at the foot. All eight editions.
Simplified-Chinese dish pages regain the shared stylesheet — the 16 Simplified-Chinese dish pages had not loaded the site-wide stylesheet, so the contents bar added on 2 October appeared as unstyled text at the foot of the page; the stylesheet link is restored.

2 October 2026

Home-page watermark gains the “You are yourselves…” quotation; each home-page carousel image becomes a themed cover

Zenodo DOI updated to 10.5281/zenodo.23102885 — the v1.5.0 core snapshot is now deposited on Zenodo; the persistent-identifier line and DOI badge on the About page point to the new DOI. The earlier v1.1.1 record (10.5281/zenodo.22288725) is kept as an earlier snapshot and remains citable.
Archive note corrected — for v1.5.0 the archive.org full-site deposit and the Zenodo core snapshot were built from the same code commit but differ in scope (archive.org holds all resources including manuscripts, certificates and video; Zenodo holds the website code only); the old note that the v1.1.1 deposits were built from different commits is removed. All eight editions.
About page — the “Content last updated · report errors by email” line under the introduction is removed. All eight editions.
Table of contents on every page — following the special-exhibition standard, every page now has a contents bar: once you scroll past the page header it stays just below the site header, highlights the section you are reading and jumps to a section on click. Entries are generated from each page’s section headings (numbered 01, 02 …); the Life page is grouped by decade and the changelog by month. The 16 Simplified Chinese recipe pages now load the shared site script like the other editions, replacing a duplicated copy of the old navigation code. All eight editions.
Phone maxim — in Chinese the last clause no longer starts a new line; it follows straight after “火候不到不出锅，” and is never broken. All eight editions.
Phone maxim — another 10% larger; in Chinese the last clause stays on one line.
Phone home page — the maxim headline is 15% larger; in Chinese and Japanese the identity line now stays on a single line on phones, its size computed from the screen width.
Phone identity line — the line “One of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine · …” is now left-aligned on phones, in line with the maxim headline and the introduction.
Phone first screen — the maxim headline shrinks to two lines (smaller still in English, French, German, Spanish and Korean), and the carousel height, folded introduction and identity line are tightened, so both entry buttons are back within the first screen on phones; the two vertical watermarks are no longer shown on phones.
Maxim headline back on phones — on phones the centred “Chen Songru (1921–1993)” gives way again to the 30 September first-screen headline “Food reveals character — if the heat isn’t right, don’t serve it; if the heart isn’t sincere, it’s not a dish.” (middle line in gold), at its original size; the name heading remains for screen readers. Desktop is unchanged. All eight editions.
Themed carousel covers — modelled on YouTube thumbnails, each carousel image is now a designed cover: a dark gradient on the left carries the text, a large gold-outlined number (1959, 37, 1982, 1987, 1991) anchors the design, the exhibition title is set in bold with a red bar, followed by a three-line summary (two on phones) and a red entry button; the cover appears only on the current image, the side images stay pure pictures. The summaries reuse the eight-language text of the former exhibition promotion blocks.
Age at death made consistent — the January 1993 workplace obituary reads “aged 72”, which is the traditional Chinese count; born on 7 December 1921, he was 71 in full years. The site had been inconsistent: the Life timeline said 72, the home page said 71, and the News page listed several reports giving 72 as errors while saying 71 came “from the obituary”, which the obituary’s own wording does not support. All editions now give 71 in full years and note on the Life and home pages that the obituary’s “aged 72” is the traditional count; the four News entries that called “72” an error now say it matches the obituary and is not an error; the Life section title “Seventy-Two Years at One Stove” becomes “Seventy-One Years at One Stove”. All eight editions.
Phone watermarks — on phones the two watermarks now sit below the two entry buttons, set vertically and centred.
Watermarks — another 20% less opaque.
Watermarks — “(Chapter 13, Section 7)” is removed from the “You are yourselves…” group, and both watermarks are 20% less opaque.
Carousel: ambient glow and cylinder scroll — the dominant colour of the current image now spreads as a wide, soft glow around it, and the glow colour shifts smoothly when the image changes; the side images turn, shrink and darken according to their distance from the centre, as if set on a cylinder, and the outermost ones fade out. Watermark colour — the engraved look stays, but the letters are now a faint gold-brown; before, they were nearly invisible on the dark ground.
Watermarks engraved — the two vertical watermarks are about a third fainter again and now look incised into the background: the letters are darker than the ground, with a very faint gold catch-light along their lower edge.
Carousel puts the main image forward — after StoryCorps: the current image is full height with a shadow, the two side images shrink to about 80% of the height and sit centred; the previous/next buttons are enlarged to 64px and moved to the outer edges of the side images.
Fainter watermarks — the two vertical watermarks on the home page are 15% fainter (desktop opacity 0.22 → 0.187, phones 0.08 → 0.068).
Watermark size — the maxim “Food reveals character…” now matches the size of the “Chen Songru” heading and is set in three vertical columns; the smaller “You are yourselves…” lines grow in proportion and are set in four columns; on shorter screens both shrink to the available height so they are always shown in full.
Watermark and carousel details — the two vertical watermarks to the right of the introduction are larger and fill that area according to the screen height; the current carousel image now lifts slightly with a shadow and a gold outline on mouse hover, like the “Six Ones” cards. All eight editions.
The carousel now moves on phones — a swipe used to be swallowed by the browser’s horizontal gesture, so the carousel could not change on phones; swipes are now read from touch events, and the carousel advances every 6 seconds (pausing on mouse hover or keyboard focus, with a new pause/play button beside the dots; with “reduce motion” switched on it still advances but without the sliding animation). Phone first screen — the introduction is folded to three lines by default (tap “Read more” for the rest), so both buttons, “Explore His Life Journey” and “How He Thought”, are visible on the first screen; the watermarks are fainter on phones so they do not get in the way of reading. All eight editions.
Home-page first screen laid out as one dark screen — the carousel, introduction and four figures now fill exactly the first screen, with the dark background running to its bottom edge; the introduction starts a new line at “This site is an independent…”; the two vertical watermarks are smaller, sit in the empty space to the right of the introduction and scale with the screen height so they are always shown in full; the heading and note of “Guided Routes” on the home page use the same type sizes as “Six Ones”. All eight editions.
Home-page first screen tightened again — the identity line is restored to “One of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine · Craft and Character of Beijing Sichuan Restaurant’s First Head Chef” and the theme line is removed; with the carousel now on the home page, the five exhibition promotion blocks below it are removed; the 1959 slide now uses the unwatermarked original of the farewell photo taken by the Shengdeng Temple catering staff on 27 June 1959, and the watermark is removed from the 37-page manuscript image; both vertical watermarks move to the right, sized by screen height so they sit wholly in the first screen; carousel, introduction, both buttons and the four figures below now all fit in the first screen (measured at 1440×900). Also fixed the carousel styles accidentally applied to the “Six Ones” cards, which had moved their labels onto the top-left of the images. All eight editions.
Home-page first screen becomes an exhibition carousel — modelled on the centred carousel of the StoryCorps home page: the five online exhibitions in year order (1959, the 37-page manuscript, 1982, 1987, 1991), with the current one large and in colour, labelled with its title and entry link, and the two neighbours dimmed in greyscale at the edges. It never auto-advances; use the arrows, dots, the left/right keys or a swipe on phones. Images are web copies made from unwatermarked originals (the 1959 char siu chicken photo, the 1982 order form, the 1987 Singapore handshake) plus the first page of the 37-page manuscript and a frame of the 1991 film. Below the carousel the existing introduction is kept; the buttons are “Explore His Life Journey” and “How He Thought” (to the Wisdom page); the four figures below are restored to the original 1959, 3×, 3000+ and 1992. All eight editions.
Home-page first screen rebuilt as an exhibition vestibule — it now carries the name and dates “Chen Songru (1921–1993)”, the identity “First head chef, Beijing Sichuan Restaurant”, the theme line “A Sichuan cook’s encounter with the twentieth century”, the existing introduction about Chen Songru unchanged, and one main image: a frame from the 1991 film High in Skill, Higher Still in Character in which he speaks (no video is embedded on the home page; the image links to the 1991 exhibition, where the passage and transcript are). The caption under the image names the film, producer and maker, date and film time, and states that it is a commendation film by his own workplace, not third-party reporting, with links to the passage and transcript and to the notes on sources. The first screen keeps one main button (explore his life journey) and one secondary entry (open the original materials). All eight editions.
Numbers and honours removed from the first screen — the strip below it used to read “3× cooked in Zhongnanhai”, “3000+ dishes (approx.)” and “1992 World Master Chefs honour”; it now shows four dates backed by documents: 1921 born in Ziyang, Sichuan; 1959 sent to Beijing to set up the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant; 1991 his own voice is recorded on video; 1993 dies. The maxim “Food reveals character…”, formerly the headline, has no verbatim original source we could find and is no longer presented as a quotation; it remains only as a background watermark.
Fixity manifest — the frame used on the first screen (taken from the 1991 film at 4:18, de-interlaced only) is added; 250 → 251 files.
Home-page watermark — besides “Food reveals character — if the heat isn’t right, don’t serve it; if the heart isn’t sincere, it’s not a dish”, the vertical watermark on the right of the first screen now carries a second group, “‘You are yourselves; only then can you be called Chen-style Sichuan cuisine.’ — to his disciples: never copy him as he was (Chapter 13, Section 7)”. Both groups use the same bold serif as the “Chen Songru” heading, and the main one is sized like the old “Songhuo chengyin” mark. All eight editions.

1 October 2026

Following the 1 October 2026 eight-language evaluation: catalogue, search index and fixity manifest realigned with the page text and now checked automatically before release; Songfeng Ruren catalogued consistently as an unpublished biography manuscript

Home-page maxim turned into a watermark — the band below the first screen carrying “Food reveals character — if the heat isn’t right, don’t serve it; if the heart isn’t sincere, it’s not a dish” (with its companion quotation) is now a faint vertical watermark on the right of the first screen, replacing the old “Songhuo chengyin” mark; the separate band is gone, so the page is more compact. All eight editions use the original Chinese line as the decorative watermark, as the old mark was. The “You are yourselves…” quotation is no longer shown on the home page but remains on the Wisdom and Community pages.
Mobile home-page first screen tightened — the elements were scattered: a two-line banner, a widely spaced tagline, a seven-line introduction and two buttons stacked at different widths. Spacing is now unified, the introduction shows four lines by default (tap “Read more” for the rest — nothing is removed) and the two buttons sit side by side at equal width; in all eight editions the buttons end between 614 and 708px, so the person, the object entry and both entry buttons fit on one screen.
Home-page first screen reworked — on a phone the first screen used to be one large maxim headline (the Korean one 335px tall) and readers had to scroll a long way to reach the introduction or any object. It now runs: who he is (the headline is now “Chen Songru (1921–1993) · A life read through manuscripts, menus and old newspapers”), the introduction, and “Start with one object” — the 1982 Sihanouk banquet order-form stub, linked to the object-comparison exhibition; on phones the object comes before the introduction. The maxim “Food reveals character…” moves to its own band below the first screen. All eight editions.
Fixed contents bar on exhibition pages — the 1959, manuscript, 1982, 1987 and 1991 exhibitions (eight editions each) are very long. Once the opening contents list scrolls away, a fixed bar appears under the header and highlights the unit being read.
“First-hand quotation” relabelled “Biographical account” — the home-page “Words he left behind” band, the Zhu De and Choe Yong-gon remarks on the Home-style Shaozi Sea Cucumber page and a footnote on the Craft page were labelled first-hand quotations, but all are transcribed from the biography manuscript Songfeng Ruren, with no recording or original to check against, and some are words said to him. They now carry the biographical-account label; the home-page band is renamed “Words recorded in the manuscript” with an explanatory note, and “first-hand quotation records” in page descriptions now reads “manuscript quotation records”.
New: “Voices this archive still lacks” — the Community page now lists five perspectives without verifiable material yet: the back kitchen and division of labour, family and separation, the occupational system and daily life, diners and service staff, and reception abroad, with how to contribute. The site does not invent assessments for them; it only lists the gaps.
Wording on the “five million copies” claim tightened — the About page said the claim was “disproved” by the copyright pages. The verified print runs (1–9,600 copies, and about 931,000 through the 16th printing in 2001) are an order of magnitude below it, but whether later printings after 2001 raised the total is not yet checked, so they cannot logically rule the claim out. It now reads “the verified print runs do not support it; printings after 2001 remain to be checked”, in all eight editions; two related phrases (“already disproven by physical evidence”) now say “does not match the print runs verified on the copyright pages”. The claim that Shi Zhengliang was Chen’s disciple remains “refuted by the family’s oral account”.
Life page geographic-trail summary sentence — reworded twice at the project lead’s direction (now “from Ziyang to Chengdu, then to Beijing”, with the Singapore trip kept in the detailed timeline below), synced across all eight editions.
Catalogue CSV aligned with the page — the page lists 72 items but the CSV had 71: the 1982 Sihanouk banquet order-form stub (MS-007) was missing and MS-002 still read “to be acquired / ownership unknown”. Both fixed; a new tools/sync_registry_from_html.py generates the CSV from the archive page and is checked before every release. The “71 items” statements on the Archive and About pages now read 72 (3 still sought).
Fixity manifest regenerated — it lagged the live files and omitted the 1982 menu originals, the 1991 film and its Chinese subtitles. It now covers 250 files (about 437 MiB), text files hashed on an LF basis so byte counts match what is served; a pre-release check blocks deployment if manifest and files disagree. The file counts in all eight About and Archive pages are updated.
Site search index rebuilt — English search for “1982” returned a superseded MS-002 record. The index is now generated from the pages themselves (title, description, text), gains the 1991 exhibition and the teaching resources, and is checked for sync before release.
Songfeng Ruren catalogued consistently — the footer called it a “memoir” (and, in Chinese, a self-written biography), and the Spanish, French and German footers used three different titles; it is an unpublished biography manuscript written by someone else. All editions now say so, with the term base’s title, and the old wordings are registered as prohibited.
Source label for the 1991 film — statements by the unit’s managers and the narration were labelled “Independent source”, but the film was made by the subject’s own workplace; relabelled “Contemporaneous institutional material”.
Teaching-resources navigation and sitemap — the Japanese, Korean, Spanish, French and German navigation still said teaching resources exist only in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese and English, although all eight editions are complete; links fixed and the five missing editions added to the sitemap with all eight hreflang entries.
Accessibility and wording — aria-expanded on expandable controls always read “false”; it now follows the visual state. The mobile “Collapse” button is localised to the page language (the English page showed Chinese). The English dish navigation “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” now reads “Fuqi Feipian”, keeping the literal rendering; the Japanese home-page phrase about dishes improved “over a life’s journey” now reads “over a lifetime”.

30 September 2026

Added a 67th-anniversary promotional video for the Sichuan Restaurant to the WeChat Channels selection; inserted a new blessing video into the WeChat Channels selection, placed ahead of the blessings for the masters of Beijing, Chongqing and Chengdu; refreshed the WeChat WeChat Channels selection's site-wide data and corrected one historical mix-up between the likes and favourites figures; fixed the P0/P1 issues from the 30 September 2026 external evaluation: a separate “physical evidence” tier, mobile and English-navigation layout, multilingual terminology and data errors

"Sixty-seven years of passing the flame on, upholding tradition and writing a new chapter" (Sichuan Restaurant) — published by the China Quanjude account on 28 September 2026, on the occasion of the Sichuan Restaurant's 67th anniversary, presenting its classic fish-fragrant dishes; 41 videos in all, synced across all 8 languages
"Honoured by the kind regard of Mr. Chen Songru, the state-banquet Sichuan cuisine master, who gave long-term appraisal and guidance" — published by the Manxueshan Yezao account on 17 May 2026, inserted ahead of "Blessings for several Sichuan cuisine masters in Beijing, Chongqing and Chengdu"; 42 videos in all, synced across all 8 languages
Engagement data synced — the likes / shares / favourites / comments counts of all 42 videos were re-checked one by one; 12 videos had changed (mostly natural growth), and for one of them ("Thanking the master for his teaching") the likes and favourites fields had been entered the wrong way round in the original record and were corrected; synced across all 8 languages
“Physical evidence” is now its own evidence tier — the “Physical” badge in the Digital Archive table shared a style class with “Independent source”, so neither machines nor readers could tell physical corroboration from third-party independent sources. It now has its own class (plum-brown): 18 places in the archive table in each of eight editions, plus the physical-certificate/reproduction badges on the Life page; the Life legend gains the tier, and the Craft, Lineage and Wisdom legends note that they contain no physical-evidence entries.
Language-availability notes no longer clipped on mobile — in Spanish, French and German at 390px, notes such as “(available in Simplified Chinese and English)” in the navigation drawer were cut off on the right; they now wrap.
English top navigation no longer hidden by the language switcher — “About & Participate” shortened to “About & Join”, and nav padding tightened below 1500px; verified complete at 1100 and 1440px.
“One of” restored in the home-page banner — the Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and Korean home pages had “founder of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine” without the qualifier, contradicting the term base and the page’s own metadata; unified.
Data and translation errors — “July 2026” was mis-rendered as “P26” in the Japanese and Korean archive pages; nine table rows in the French archive still had English attributes; one stray “1974年” heading, one Chinese full stop and 42 full-width colons in German; the English education page linked to the Simplified Chinese changelog; the “Correction” tag in Lineage footnotes was untranslated in six editions; and six translations of “disciple’s oral account” in the term base had been mismatched to “physical reproduction”.
English changelog backfilled by 12 entries — it had fallen 12 entries behind (8–30 September); it now matches the Chinese master entry for entry (47).
Sitemap lastmod now refreshed at deploy time — rewritten from each page’s last git commit date instead of being hand-maintained.
Navigation and footers unified — each of the eight editions kept its own copy of the header navigation and footer, and the footers of a single language had 8–14 different wordings; the 1959, 1991, Singapore and story pages were still on an old template translation, and one Spanish page had a broken nav-button attribute. The home page of each language is now the master, and a new tools/sync_nav.py syncs (and checks, before release) all other pages — 115 places brought into line.
“Oil-Net Lantern Chicken” naming unified — the Japanese pages used three spellings of the dish name, the Spanish pages mixed several renderings (Red de Aceite / Red de Grasa / Redaño) and one French page had a stray variant; all follow the term base now, and the old forms are registered as prohibited so they cannot creep back.

26 September 2026

Lineage and Life Journey pages: corrected details in Chen Tinglong's résumé and the original wording of Chen Changming's remark

Chen Tinglong (eldest son) résumé corrected — birth month changed from August 1948 to September; the school he graduated from changed from "成都市第五中学" (Chengdu No. 5 Middle School) to "成都列五中学" (Chengdu Liewu Middle School); the place where his apprenticeship began changed from "盐口竹林小餐厅" to "盐市口竹林小餐厅" (the Zhulin small restaurant at Yanshikou); synced across all 8 languages
Chen Changming's remark restored in full — "This child has fire in his eyes" expanded to the complete original: "This child has fire in his eyes. When the heat is right, the ingredients will speak; when the fire in the heart burns strong, the dish will have a soul." Updated in two places across the Lineage and Life Journey pages, synced across all 8 languages

24 September 2026

1982 exhibition: guest identity verified, and the placement of the site-wide evidence-strength legend corrected; evidence labels and opening-title sizes of the 37 Pages, 1982, 21 Days in Singapore and 1991 exhibitions brought up to the 1959 standard; wording of the 1982 transcription note simplified; the opening title of 21 Days in Singapore now displays on a single line; 1959 Sichuan Cuisine Comes to Beijing page: selection city corrected from Meishan to Leshan

1982: One Banquet, Two Menus — the sixth person on the guest list was verified against authoritative sources as Han Nianlong (1910–2000); the earlier "unverified" marking was withdrawn and a biographical footnote added. The evidence-strength legends of the 37 Pages, 21 Days in Singapore and 1982 exhibitions were moved to sit beneath their own opening section titles; synced across all 8 languages
Visual unification of four exhibitions — the opening titles and evidence-strength legends of the 37 Pages, 1982, 21 Days in Singapore and 1991 exhibitions had been noticeably smaller than those of 1959; all four now use the same large title size and legend layout as 1959, synced across all 8 languages
1982: One Banquet, Two Menus — the passage in the transcription note that first marked something as doubtful and then narrated the process of withdrawing that marking has been deleted, and the reading conclusion is now stated directly; 21 Days in Singapore: The 1987 Footage — the opening title used to wrap onto a second line in some languages and now displays on a single line (font size unchanged); synced across all 8 languages
Historical correction — in the list of source cities for the chefs selected to go to Beijing, "眉山" (Meishan) was corrected to "乐山" (Leshan); all 8 language versions synced

23 September 2026

Fifth online exhibition launched, "1982: One Banquet, Two Menus", publishing for the first time the two drafts of the Sihanouk birthday-banquet menu in Chen Songru's own hand, read dish by dish against the restaurant's banquet order sheet; online exhibitions are now always ordered by year; the homepage "Six Ones" order-sheet card now links to the 1982 exhibition; fixed a hidden bug in which straight quotation marks truncated attributes on German, English and Spanish pages; evidence-strength labelling unified across the five exhibitions; fixed card links being wrongly styled red and underlined by a generic rule; two mobile layouts redone; the 1982 exhibition gained an opening highlights unit and three oral / documentary additions; evidence-label formats of 1959 and 21 Days in Singapore unified; spacing details of the evidence-strength legends of the 37 Pages, 1982 and 21 Days in Singapore exhibitions aligned with 1959

New exhibition live — 1982: One Banquet, Two Menus: Chen Songru's two hand-drafted menus, Draft A and Draft B, are shown in full for the first time and read dish by dish against the stub of the Sichuan Restaurant's banquet order sheet; five discrepancies (seven tables vs eight, five-flower platter vs flower platter, tuanyu vs yuanyu for the turtle, the detailed draft list vs the abridged list, the longevity peaches missing from the order sheet) are set side by side as they stand; launched in 8 languages, with entries added to the site-wide navigation and the homepage
Transcription corrections — after a character-by-character check against the original, three mis-transcriptions in the Sihanouk state-banquet menu on the Craft & Dishes page were corrected: "喜鹤闹梅" → "喜鹊闹梅", "宜宾糖蛋" → "宜宾糟蛋", "口蘑奶汤豆花" → "口蘑清汤豆花"
Digital Archive — MS-002 (the draft menus) changed from "to be collected" to "held" (originals held by the family, Drafts A and B), and a new entry MS-007 (order-sheet stub) added; the catalogue now totals 72 entries, of which 69 are held and 3 are yet to be collected
Site search fixed — the search indexes for Korean, French, German and Spanish could not load because of a single missing comma; fixed, and site search works again in these four languages
Exhibitions ordered by year — the site-wide navigation drop-down, the homepage promotion strip and the sister-exhibition buttons in each exhibition's closing hall are now all ordered by the year of the event: 1959 → 37 Pages → 1982 → 1987 → 1991; the navigation order on the Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish pages of the 1991 exhibition, which had been scrambled, was corrected at the same time
Sister-exhibition cross-links completed — the closing halls of the 1959, 37 Pages, 1987 and 1991 exhibitions all gained an entry to "1982: One Banquet, Two Menus"; synced across all 8 languages
Homepage "Six Ones" — the card "One order sheet, physical witness of a state banquet" now links to the 1982 physical-evidence exhibition, and its label is changed to "Online exhibition · 1982"
Attribute-quote truncation fixed — besides manuscript37-de, 7 more cases were found: on German pages, a closing straight quotation mark after a German opening quote "„..."" cut the HTML attribute short (meta description / alt / data-caption). The meta descriptions of 1959-de, singapore1987-de and profile1991-de and the image alt texts of index-de/en/es were affected, and the corresponding search snippets in search-index-de.js were truncated too. All 273 pages in 8 languages were scanned with Python's html.parser to locate the abnormal attributes, each was verified and fixed, and unaffected pages were left untouched
Evidence-strength labelling aligned with the 1959 standard — the 37 Pages, 21 Days in Singapore and 1991 exhibitions gained the page-top evidence-strength legend (previously only 1959 and 1982 had it), and key facts that carried only a footnote number without an inline label received the matching badge at the level already set by each page's own footnote: +2 on 37 Pages, +5 on 21 Days in Singapore, +7 on 1991. The legend wording of all five exhibitions was unified to the five-level version used by 1959 (distinguishing "first-hand account" from "first-hand object"); synced across all 8 languages
Fix: card links wrongly styled red and underlined by a generic rule — the shared stylesheet's rule that in-text links are always red and underlined had wrongly caught the recipe cards of the 37 Pages and 1982 exhibitions (which are meant to be quiet card links, not inline citation links); they are now excluded, and the dish cards on both pages are back to their original ink-coloured text
Mobile layout redone — on phones, the six cards of "Dishes on the menu that are still served today" in the 1982 exhibition had reused the shrunken style of the restaurant-menu cards (description hidden, font size cut to .76rem), so a single column carried far less information; and the dish-by-dish comparison table on phones was a plain white card, at odds with the site's warm rice-paper tone. Both were redesigned; synced across all 8 languages
New content in the 1982 exhibition — added from research material selected by the site owner: Deng Xiaoping's and Sihanouk's after-dinner words (Chen Songru's autobiography / 1988 memoir, first-hand account) were made into a separate opening "highlights hall" unit, modelled on the UNIT00 format of 21 Days in Singapore; the alternative reading "Piao Honghui" for the sixth guest is set alongside as it stands; biographical accounts of Liu Shaokui (head of the stove line, who discussed the menu with Chen Songru) and Chen Jingzhen (chef of the dandan noodles) were added; Zhou Sheng's oral account gained two more details (on-site security check; the independent corroboration that "Deng Xiaoping asked Sihanouk to celebrate his birthday" was the sixtieth birthday). The unit numbering and footnotes 1–6 of the whole page were renumbered; synced across all 8 languages
Evidence-label format unified — labels in the 1959 and 21 Days in Singapore exhibitions that deviated from the site standard were brought into line: the five quotation sources in 21 Days in Singapore had used abbreviated labels at a reduced size ("Independent" / "Physical" / "Biographical", .68rem) and are back to the full-size standard terms "Independent source" and "Biographical account"; two custom long labels in 1959 ("dating unverified", "corroborated by family documents, pending independent verification") became the standard short terms plus `.badge-note` explanatory text, matching the approach already piloted on lineage.html. Synced across all 8 languages
Evidence-strength legend spacing fine-tuned — when the legend wording of 1959 was copied into the 37 Pages, 1982 and 21 Days in Singapore exhibitions, the inline style `margin-top:8px` was left out, so the gap between legend and body text above was slightly looser than in 1959; now restored, synced across all 8 languages

22 September 2026

Two menu-booklet images on the 21 Days in Singapore page fixed for format overflow; layout of the "From Beijing to the Lion City" section on that page improved; a report on the origins of Wangyou Denglongji added to Stories & Oral History; order of two entries in the News page's Lineage & Disciples section corrected; one third-party report each added to the News page's Lineage & Disciples and Stories sections

Image misalignment in the "Venue and Menus" section fixed — the two images of pages 1 and 2 of the menu booklet lacked width/height attributes, so the CSS aspect-ratio:5/8 rule rendered them as tall strips far taller than the other cards in the row, breaking the design size; after adding width="240" height="158" (exactly the convention of the other 5 images in the section), the four cards are now of equal height; synced across all 8 languages
"Map and Timeline" section re-laid out — in the old two-column layout the map was short and the timeline much longer, leaving a large blank space below the map while the timeline column was too narrow; the map column is now narrower (giving the timeline more room) and the map is position:sticky, following the reader as they scroll, so the wasted blank space now accompanies the reader down the page; on mobile the original stacked order is kept without sticking; synced across all 8 languages
New source: the origins of Che Yaoxian's / Nuli Canting's "Wangyou Denglongji" (Oil-Net Lantern Chicken) — a 2026 article on the WeChat official account "Dudu Jiu Fen Bao" telling the story behind the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant's "Wangyou Denglongji": Che Yaoxian's creation of the "lantern chicken", Chongqing's Huixian Lou, the 1982 trip to the USA, and the caul-fat wrapping technique of "three folds, five layers". It differs somewhat from Chen Tinglong's A Brief Discussion of State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine, which says the dish was "separately improved from Wangyou Hebao Ji" (caul-fat purse chicken); the difference is noted honestly in the entry description. Synced across all 8 languages and inserted, by publication date, ahead of the entry "Behind a Set of Books"
Order corrected — "Distinguished figures of the industry visit to give guidance, helping the enterprise's innovative development" (2024) moved ahead of "Master Chen Tinglong's apprenticeship ceremony held at the Chengdu Sichuan Cuisine Museum" (2025), so that the order follows publication date; all 8 language versions synced
The Legend of Luyao Hot Pot — a WeChat article citation added to the Lineage & Disciples section, telling how Luyao, founder of a Shaanxi hot-pot brand, studied under Chen Songru and Xiao Jianming at the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant in his youth; synced across all 8 languages
Colourful Characters and Stories from the Sichuan Cuisine World — a WeChat article citation added to the Stories section, on the origins of camphor-tea duck and Chen Songru's own recollection that at the 1954 Geneva Conference Zhou Enlai entertained Charlie Chaplin with this dish, a diplomatic anecdote; synced across all 8 languages

18 September 2026

Watermarks removed from the homepage six-grid thumbnails, synced across all 8 languages

Watermarks removed from the thumbnails of the homepage "Six Ones" entries — apart from the Singapore newspaper clipping, which never had a watermark, the other 5 (the Beidaihe group photo / the Sihanouk order sheet / the photo with Deng Xiaoping / the 1986 certificate of honour / the 1992 award-ceremony group photo) now use the watermark-free clean-thumb versions; the large images shown after clicking through to the detail pages keep their watermarks unchanged

17 September 2026

Completed education page in 5 more languages, added changelog notice pages in 6 languages — fixing 8 crawl 404s reported in Google Search Console

Full Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Spanish translations of the education page — previously only available in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and English. This gap was one source of the 8 404s Google Search Console's Page Indexing report surfaced (Google had guessed at URLs following the site's usual language-suffix pattern that had never actually existed). All five new translations preserve every curator's-tour case study, the full lesson-plan table, and all three student worksheets, with every cross-page link pointing to that language's own version of the target page.
Added notice pages for the changelog in six more languages (Traditional Chinese, Japanese, Korean, French, German, Spanish) — rather than translating all 40 dated entries one by one, which would be an ever-growing maintenance burden, each is a short page stating that the full changelog is maintained only in Simplified Chinese and English, with links to both. This was the site owner's explicit decision.
Fixed dangling changelog references in the five new education pages — these originally linked to the Simplified Chinese changelog with a parenthetical note that it was only available in Chinese, Japanese, and English; now that every language has its own notice page, they link directly to the matching-language changelog page instead.
Added six changelog-language waivers to termbase.json — these notice pages are, by design, far shorter than the Simplified Chinese changelog's 40 historical entries, which would otherwise trip the abridged-translation detector as a false positive. Added waivers matching the existing en:changelog precedent, with the reasoning spelled out.

16 September 2026

Dividers in the Life and Encyclopedia section restored to the site-wide default style; the team title on the About page now states Chen Tinglong's identity; team-list table layout fixed so titles and names align

Special-case darker dividers withdrawn — the dividers between the Baidu Baike / Kuaidong Baike / Mingrenwang / Sogou Baike entries are back to the site-wide default 14% opacity, matching the other source-list entries visually, and the .divider-strong style class added just for this was deleted
Chen Tinglong's title made more accurate — "Honorary Advisor" changed to "Eldest Son · Honorary Advisor", stating his real identity as Chen Songru's eldest son (recorded on both lineage.html and archive.html); synced across all 8 languages
Column alignment fixed in the team / committee lists — the old flex layout gave each row its own width, so a variable-length title such as "Eldest Son · Honorary Advisor" stretched its row and misaligned it with the names in the other rows; a table layout is now used (column widths are set automatically by the longest title on the page), applied to the lists on both about.html and committee.html in all 8 languages

15 September 2026

Technical fixes following a second SEO audit: normalized og:locale, added an award field to Person structured data, site-wide BreadcrumbList, new llms.txt; completed SEO infrastructure for all 128 craft-lessons files (16 recipes x 8 languages)

Normalized og:locale — corrected to the proper xx_XX format (e.g. bare "en" became "en_US"), and added og:locale:alternate declarations across 125 pages to state the relationship between all 8 language editions.
Added an award field to Person structured data — the 16 files in the index/life family that carry the full Person schema now include the 1992 honor. This also surfaced and fixed a pre-existing bug: the jobTitle field in 6 of those 8 languages had been left untranslated in Chinese all along.
Site-wide BreadcrumbList structured data — 109 pages now carry a two-level Home → Page breadcrumb to help search engines understand site structure.
New llms.txt — a structured overview file aimed at AI/LLM crawlers, listing core pages and the site's content-scope declaration.
Corrected an earlier audit mistake — a prior SEO report claimed the 15 recipe pages under /craft-lessons/ had no translated versions. On closer inspection, all 8 language editions already existed and were already live; what was actually missing was sitemap coverage, hreflang cross-links, OG tags, and structured data. This round fills in that infrastructure.
Backfilled 32 missing meta descriptions (16 Traditional Chinese entirely missing, 13 English, 3 Spanish) — newly written from the Simplified Chinese source rather than machine-translated word for word, matching the voice of each language's existing descriptions.
Recipe structured data extracted per one of four table layouts: 12 standard single-table recipes, 2 (Strange-Flavor Shredded Chicken, Yu-Xiang Prawns) with a second table used instead of the first, Mapo Tofu's 5-column dual-source table (using the manuscript-recorded column, not the biography-relayed one), and Clear Soup Mixed Delicacies with no table at all (field omitted). Ingredient and step counts were checked one-for-one against the Simplified Chinese baseline across all 112 files with zero discrepancies.
Found and fixed a real bug along the way: 14 French recipe pages (all but Twice-Cooked Pork and Kung Pao Chicken) were missing the closing </head> tag. Earlier structural checks only ever counted opening tags, never closing ones, so this had gone unnoticed until inserting a new script block required locating </head> precisely.
New search-engine split: Simplified Chinese targets Baidu, the other 7 languages target Google/Bing — the site owner's decision. 33 Simplified Chinese files (16 core pages, 16 craft-lessons pages, and story.html) now carry a keywords meta tag; the other 7 language editions do not get one. Every keyword is drawn from that page's own existing title or description, nothing invented — Google ignores this tag entirely either way, so there's no downside there, and Baidu's own webmaster documentation still recommends filling it in.
New Baidu "active push" tool (tools/baidu_push.py) — Baidu site ownership was already verified some time ago (see baidu_verify_codeva-lUalcLlCmK.html), but active push (which gets newly published pages indexed within minutes to hours instead of waiting for organic crawling) had never been set up. The tool is ready; it just needs a token from the site owner's Baidu Search Resource Platform account, and runs in a safe read-only preview mode until one is provided.
Connected Google Search Console — added a google-site-verification meta tag to index.html's head after the site owner provided the verification code. Once verification completes, real search performance data (queries, indexing status, crawl errors) becomes visible in the GSC dashboard.

14 September 2026

Site-wide SEO: recipe pages given complete meta tags and added to the index, and the titles of 8 core pages now include the keyword Chen Songru; sitemap.xml gained lastmod and the 16 recipe pages gained Recipe structured data; loading speed: font loading strategy changed to swap and image dimension attributes completed site-wide to prevent layout shift; loading speed, second batch: site-search index now lazy-loaded; response to the professional evaluation report, first batch: visibility of the honest boundary, and metadata-standard mapping; response to the evaluation report, second batch: a light-entry "Treasures of the Hall" section added to the homepage; homepage Treasures section revised: inconsistent image proportions fixed, and it now links to the four major exhibitions + Life Journey + the Committee; homepage six cards adjusted again: now using the four physical-evidence items + the lineage chart + the 37-page manuscript, with a new lineage-chart screenshot added; homepage card 6 image restored to its original portrait proportion; News page gained a report on the collation symposium for Collected Rare Documents of Chinese Sichuan Cuisine; homepage six cards adjusted again: card 1 now uses the Beidaihe group photo and cards 2 and 6 the 1992 award photo; News page entry order corrected; homepage six-card order and card 5 content adjusted again; homepage card 5 image changed again: a Shin Min Daily News weekend-tea-corner clipping; fixed 3 long-standing image-proportion distortion bugs (manuscript cover / draft pages / photo walls of 1959 and 1991); homepage card 3 link changed to the 1991 "What Was on His Mind" exhibition; third image-proportion bug on manuscript37.html fixed: forced cropping by .ms-grid replaced by display at each page's true proportion

SEO audit and fixes — the 16 Simplified Chinese recipe teaching pages (craft-lessons/), which previously had no SEO meta tags at all and were not in sitemap.xml, were given a meta description, canonical, Open Graph and Twitter Card tags and added to sitemap.xml; the title tags of 8 core pages (About / Digital Archive / Committee / Community / Craft / Life Journey / Lineage / News) had only said "section name · Baiwei Songru" without the keyword "Chen Songru", and all 8 language versions now include it
SEO optimisation, second batch — all 141 URLs in sitemap.xml gained lastmod (taken from the git commit history, not invented dates); the 16 craft-lessons recipe pages gained schema.org Recipe structured data (ingredients and steps extracted directly from the recipe tables and method steps already on the pages; fields with no supporting source were honestly left empty — for example the Clear-Broth Assorted Braise page never had a gram-by-gram ingredient table, so no ingredient list was invented to fill the gap)
Loading-speed optimisation, first batch — font-display for the body fonts (Noto Sans / Serif SC, 10 @font-face rules in all) changed from block to swap, so on weak connections the whole page's text is no longer invisible for up to 3 seconds (the decorative brush-script font keeps block, the impact being negligible); the real width/height attributes were added to 1,139 <img> tags referencing manuscript / certificate images site-wide (read from actual pixels with Pillow, not fixed values), which together with the existing CSS aspect-ratio rules further reduces layout shift while scrolling
Site-search index lazy-loaded — the search-index*.js files of all 117 pages site-wide (including the 8 language versions) are now injected dynamically only when the search box is focused or typed into, instead of being included statically at page load, reducing unrelated JS on first paint; the 8 pages of the 1991 online exhibition (the profile1991 series), which have no search box, had the redundant search-index script reference removed altogether.
A uniform entry note added to inferential pages — the Wisdom page has a new line at the top (synced in 8 languages) stating directly that the mental models are analytical frameworks distilled by researchers, not a verbatim compilation of Chen Songru's own words, and linking to the full honest-boundary statement, so readers no longer have to click through to the About page to find this; the "1991: What Was on His Mind" page was checked and found to explain the nature of its source material sufficiently in its source unit and disclaimer block, so nothing was duplicated.
Metadata-standard mapping — collection-registry.csv (71 catalogued entries) gained a rights_statement_uri column, marking each entry's copyright status with standard RightsStatements.org statements (e.g. InC = in copyright, UND = copyright status undetermined), and material photographed by the site itself is honestly left blank rather than filled in; archive.html (8 languages) also declares how the CSV fields map to Dublin Core / DCMI Metadata Terms, for academic citation and harvesting by aggregation platforms.
Homepage Treasures of the Hall — in response to the evaluation report's remark that "the whole site is extremely text-dense and lacks a light entry route", a 3-minute overview of 6 selected physical items was added below the homepage fact-strip (synced in 8 languages): the 37-page manuscript; a Beidaihe group photo whose year is overturned by the evidence; the detail that the dish made on the day of the award was a home-style one; the Singapore state-banquet menu in physical form; a photo with Deng Xiaoping whose shooting time cannot be pinned down; the 2023 apprenticeship plaque — all chosen from the existing 71 Digital Archive entries, with no new entry invented, and each linking back to its full catalogue entry. New .highlight-grid / .highlight-card styles were added to assets/style.css (stamp_assets.py was run to sync the fingerprint).
Homepage six-card revision — in response to the feedback "image heights are inconsistent, a bit ugly": the assets/style.css .highlight-card img rule was fixed (it had set only aspect-ratio without overriding height, so browsers took the height attribute of the <img> tag, making the six images anywhere from 158px to 528px tall; with height:auto added they are now cropped uniformly at 4:3). The card content was also changed from "selected Digital Archive entries" to "six major entry-point navigation": the 37-page manuscript exhibition, the 1959 exhibition, the 21 Days in Singapore exhibition, the 1991 What Was on His Mind exhibition, Life Journey and the Committee, each image linking directly to its page, and each image chosen from representative material already on that page (8 languages synced).
Homepage six-card content adjusted again — following feedback, the target page and image of each of the 6 cards were reselected: ① 1959 exhibition (unchanged); ② Craft (craft.html), with the image changed to the physical order sheet of the 1982 banquet for Sihanouk's 60th birthday; ③ Life Journey (life.html), with the image changed to the 1986 Beijing Culinary Association certificate of honour (signatory confirmed by the family as Xi Zhongxun); ④ Lineage (lineage.html), with a new screenshot of the lineage tree (generated from the page's .tree-diagram block, not new archive material, and, like the site's video poster images, not catalogued separately); ⑤ Digital Archive (archive.html#PH-034), the photo with Deng Xiaoping / Yang Shangkun; ⑥ 37-page manuscript exhibition (manuscript37.html), with the image changed from the cover to body page ①, plus a new .highlight-card.contain style (object-fit:contain) so the portrait manuscript page is shown whole without cropping. 8 languages synced.
37-page manuscript card image proportion adjusted — the previous version used object-fit:contain to fit the portrait manuscript page into a 4:3 landscape box with blank margins on both sides; the site owner's feedback was to restore the image's original portrait shape, so .highlight-card.contain img gained aspect-ratio:auto and the image frame of that card now follows the image's true proportion (no longer forced into 4:3), matching how the manuscript is shown on manuscript37.html itself; the other 5 cards are unaffected and keep the uniform 4:3 crop.
News · Stories and Oral History — added the China News Service Sichuan report of 21 June 2026, The Old Masters Behind a Set of Books, an independent official source. Chen Tinglong is named as one of the veteran masters who took part in the collation. The report's sentence that "Chen Songru's posthumous manuscript is about to be formally published" corroborates the Authentic Exposition of the Craft of a Chinese Sichuan Master: Chen Songru (compiled by the same chief editor, Li Zuomin) already catalogued on this site, and is background reporting a month before that book's formal publication. 8 languages synced.
Homepage cards 1 and 6 adjusted again — card 1's image was changed from the 1959 Shengdengsi send-off photo to the Beidaihe holiday-reward group photo, using its original caption ("After first cooking for Mao Zedong at Zhongnanhai, Chen Songru was rewarded with a ten-day holiday at Beidaihe"), still linking to 1959.html; card 6 changed from manuscript37.html to archive.html#PH-004, with the image changed to the 1992 World Master Chefs Association award-ceremony group photo, and the .highlight-card.contain style added earlier just for the manuscript page's portrait proportion was removed (no card uses it any more, cleaned up in passing). 8 languages synced; during this work an already-existing broken HTML attribute in the Korean version's card 6 was found and fixed (alt= directly nested quotation marks, which browsers truncate at that tag, and which check_terms.py had not been able to detect).
News page entry order corrected — position corrected by publication time: the China News Service Sichuan report of 21 June 2026 moved ahead of the 2026 WeChat "Beijing Xicheng" report, 8 languages synced.
Homepage six cards rearranged — as most recently instructed: ③ is now archive.html#PH-034 (the photo with Deng Xiaoping / Yang Shangkun, moved up from the old ⑤ position); ④ is the Xi Zhongxun certificate on life.html (moved back from ③); ⑤ has changed from the lineage.html lineage chart to singapore1987.html, with the image changed to the bilingual interview clipping from The Straits Times, 11 August 1987, page 4 (imagery from the National Library Board of Singapore's NewspaperSG); ①②⑥ unchanged. 8 languages synced.
Homepage card 5 image changed — from the bilingual Straits Times interview clipping (NC-015) to the clipping of the Shin Min Daily News, 22 August 1987, page 11, "Weekend Tea Corner" column, Eating Authentic Sichuan Food (NC-013), still linking to singapore1987.html. 8 languages synced.
Image-proportion distortion bug fixed — after the site owner reported that the cover image of the 37-page manuscript exhibition looked wrong, investigation found that in manuscript37.html two inline styles (.ms-cover, the cover image, and .draft-grid, the draft pages of Unit 06) and in 1959.html and profile1991.html the shared inline style of .obj-figure.filled (the historical photo wall) all set only width:100% without height:auto — the browser takes the literal height attribute of the <img> tag as the height, so images were stretched or squashed. This is the same class of CSS trap as the homepage cards of 14 September, but these 3 places were long-standing legacy problems, not introduced that day. height:auto was added to the 4 inline CSS rules, and a site-wide scan confirmed no more omissions of this kind. It affects 21 files of manuscript37.html, 1959.html and profile1991.html (8 + 8 + 5 languages).
Homepage card 3 link adjusted — from archive.html#PH-034 to profile1991.html, with the image and text temporarily left as the original PH-034 photo. 8 languages synced.
Whole-manuscript thumbnail proportion fixed — .ms-grid img had been forcing aspect-ratio:2886/4232 (the overall proportion of the original high-resolution master scan) together with object-fit:cover to crop all 37 page thumbnails uniformly, but the actual web-version thumbnails do not all share one proportion (from 0.71 to 0.77, from the real margins of the page-by-page scanning), so every page had a slice of content cropped off. With height:auto, all 37 thumbnails of the whole volume are now shown complete at their own true proportions, no longer forcibly cropped. 8 languages synced.

12 September 2026

The "Glossary and Standard Translations" table now uses the site's proper table style

Glossary visual fix — the glossary added yesterday used `obj-table`, a class for which no CSS was ever actually defined, so it rendered as the browser-default table with no borders or background, out of step with the card-style look of the "Sources" block above; it now sits in a `.card` container (the way tables that actually have styling are written on this site, with header background, hover zebra stripes, and rows collapsing into cards on mobile); 8 languages synced, content unchanged by a single character

11 September 2026

Consistency of Digital Archive cataloguing and integrity checking repaired following the three-party evaluation: CSV completed with 10 missing entries, fixity manifest regenerated, age at death corrected, strength of the English / French / German / Spanish "founder" wording unified; second and third priority items of the 2026-09-10 three-party evaluation repaired: hreflang cross-links, IIIF English labels, language labelling on the education / changelog pages, headline size on the first screen in long languages, glossary, backup transparency, independent BagIt verification, IA / Zenodo build identifiers, manuscript resolution note; last item of the first priority list landed: BK-002 publisher field confirmed against the physical book, and the other two items left as they are by the site owner's decision

Digital Archive CSV synced — collection-registry.csv gained the 10 entries PH-034 and NC-007 to NC-015 that had existed only in the HTML text, so all 71 now match; the archive.html / about.html totals in 8 languages (catalogued entries 61 → 71, held 57 → 67, fixity file total and composition: 220 original files → 236 files: 114 original images / 115 thumbnails / 6 videos / 1 IIIF manifest, about 384MB) were corrected to match
fixity-manifest.csv regenerated — the last generation dated from 2026-08-06; the 20 files of the 10 entries added since had never been entered, and 5 current clipping / manifest files no longer matched the old byte counts; it is now generated by tracing the resources actually referenced in the whole site's HTML, and 6 historical orphan files no longer referenced by any page (including the retired ch6 video and images of singapore1987) were dropped
Age at death unified as 71 — the epitaph paragraph on the 8-language homepages still said 72, inconsistent with the conclusion of 71 already established on 2026-08-28 and written into the changelog; now unified
Strength of the "founder of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine" wording unified — the English homepage already used the more cautious "one of the founders", but the French, German and Spanish homepage headlines used the absolute "Fondateur / Gründer / Fundador" (contradicting the cautious "pionniers / Wegbereiter / pioneros" already used in each language's meta description); changed to "Un des Fondateurs / Einer der Gründer / Uno de los Fundadores", in line with the rest of the site
hreflang cross-links completed — the Simplified Chinese masters of the two feature pages manuscript37 and singapore1987 had no cross-language hreflang at all (only self-references), the French version lacked German / Spanish and the German version lacked Spanish; all pages in 8 languages are now fully cross-linked
English labels added to the 37-page manuscript IIIF manifest — the 41 Canvases had only zh-Hans labels; they now reuse, page by page, the English captions already published in manuscript37-en.html, so no second independent translation is produced
Language labelling fixed for the education / changelog navigation entries — in the navigation drop-downs of 107 files, three translated versions, changelog-en.html and education-en.html / education-zh-tw.html, had long existed but the navigation had never caught up: the English pages still said "Chinese only" and linked back to the Chinese version, and the Traditional Chinese page did the same for education; the English / Traditional Chinese links now point to their own translations, and the notice in the other 5 languages changed from "Chinese only" to an accurate list of available languages (including 7 instances of the same outdated wording in about.html)
Headline on the first screen narrowed for long languages — on mobile, the homepage headline size in English, French, German and Spanish was reduced from the clamp() floor of 2.6rem to 1.9rem, easing the problem found in the 2026-09 evaluation that "the headline fills a whole screen and the introduction of the person appears too late"
New section "Glossary and Standard Translations" — a glossary added to the 8-language about.html, generated directly from tools/termbase.json, listing the standard renderings of 16 key personal names / institutions / works / dishes; it also honestly discloses the translation method: AI-assisted whole-sentence translation checked with a terminology-consistency tool, with no independent native-speaker review stage yet
"One of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine" wording corrected — in the course of checking termbase.json it turned out that the French / German / Spanish homepage headlines' "Fondateur / Gründer / Fundador" (along with the "un des" prefix added last time) were not the preferred translations set by the glossary at all; the glossary's real standard is "pionniers / Wegbereiter / pioneros", now corrected to match the glossary exactly
Backup transparency note — the "Long-term preservation" section had only said "off-site backups also exist"; it now honestly lists the three backup layers (local / GitHub / Tencent Cloud COS + CDN) and the sync mechanism of each, and states plainly that no full restore drill has yet been carried out
BagIt preservation package independently verified — the v1.1.1 preservation package was fully validated with the open-source tool bagit-python (v1.9.0), maintained by the Library of Congress (including recomputation of every file's SHA-256); it passed on 2026-09-11, and the earlier wording "not verified by an independent tool" was updated to the real verification result
IA / Zenodo build identifiers distinguished — both archives are labelled v1.1.1 but were built from different commits (archive.org corresponds to 53406d0, Zenodo to the later 364d644 that fixed a metadata field); the difference is explained in the "How to cite this site" section, and citers are advised to state the specific source
Manuscript scan-resolution note — the manuscript37 page had mentioned only the 2886×4232-pixel high-resolution scan, without saying that what the site actually shows is a web version compressed to 1500 pixels wide; this is now explained, with contact details for obtaining the original scans
BK-002 publisher field corrected — the site owner supplied a photo of the copyright page of the physical Beijing Sichuan Restaurant Recipes, confirming the publisher as "Sichuan Science and Technology Publishing House" (the body text had wrongly said "Sichuan People's Publishing House", contradicting the remarks column's "in the 1980s the Sichuan Science and Technology Publishing House commissioned a book from Chen Songru"); at the same time, following the physical copyright page, the title was corrected from Sichuan Restaurant Recipes to the full Beijing Sichuan Restaurant Recipes, consistent with existing citations on about.html; CSV synced

9 September 2026

Two new sources added to the News page: the history of the pocket tofu dish, and a biographical overview of Chen Songru (the latter with several points honestly marked as not accepted); one new source in Life & Encyclopedia

New in Stories and Oral History — "Pocket Tofu — a Soft, Sichuan-style Skilled Vegetarian Dish (created by master chef Chen Songru)" (2026), describing a clear-broth skilled vegetarian dish not previously recorded on this site and its three processes of frying, rinsing and simmering, consistent with the 1969 Furong Restaurant timeline on this site's Life page; as the most recently published entry in the section it is placed last in the section; 8 languages synced
Publication year corrected — "Famous Chefs and Master Teachers of Modern Sichuan Cuisine (9): Chen Songru" had been marked "publication date not stated"; the site owner confirmed it was in fact published in 2025, and the entry was corrected in 8 languages
New in Life & Encyclopedia — "Chen Songru: A Sichuan Cuisine Grandmaster Whose Flavours Span East and West, Whose Way Links Past and Present", a long AI-compiled article; it disagrees with material this site has confirmed at several points, all honestly noted as not accepted: age at death 72 (this site's research gives 71), the book title Authentic Sichuan Cuisine: 160 Examples (the physical book is 160 Dishes), the claim that he originated "Kaishui Baicai" and "Gongbao Prawns" (this site, based on family materials, records them as old Sichuan dishes he improved), and the Singapore newspaper headlines it cites, which are not found in the original local Singapore newspapers catalogued on this site; 8 languages synced

8 September 2026

Browser-tab icon refined; favicon changed back to the enlarged original image

favicon optimisation — the lines of the original "Songhuo heyi" (Pine and Fire as One) totem blurred at small sizes; it was changed to a vermilion square-seal ground with a rice-paper-coloured silhouette, so the browser tab is clearer and easier to recognise
favicon adjustment — the vermilion square-seal version did not work well, so the original "Songhuo heyi" totem was restored and enlarged overall by about 1.27 times, reducing the blank margin of the canvas

5 September 2026

Fixed the Zenodo DOI badge wrapping onto two lines; added a backup reprint link in "Historical Stories & Oral Accounts"

Zenodo DOI badge no longer wraps — the badge image already displays the full DOI, so the duplicate doi.org text link immediately after it (which was getting pushed onto its own line inside narrow cards) has been removed. Synced across all eight language editions.
Added a backup reprint link for "The Sichuan Restaurant — Sited and Named by Premier Zhou Enlai Himself" — besides the original "Beijing Xicheng" publication already on file, the same article was also reprinted by the "Quanjude Group" WeChat account; that reprint has now been folded into the same entry as a backup link. Synced across all eight language editions.
DOI badge repositioned — the badge image now flows directly after "giving it a persistent identifier independent of this domain:" on the same line, removing the forced line break that left it looking stranded on its own line. Synced across all eight language editions.
New entry in "Historical Stories & Oral Accounts": "The Fish-Fragrant Pork of a Lifetime: Its Past and Present" (WeChat account "Wild Foodie Habao", 2026) — surveys the Sichuan/Chongqing divide in fish-fragrant shredded pork, citing the illustrated recipe in Chen Songru's 1991 book Authentic Sichuan Cuisine, 160 Dishes as an example of how ingredients such as cooking wine and reconstituted dried bamboo shoots have simplified out of common practice over time. Synced across all eight language editions.
The DOI badge is properly fixed now — what looked like a stray line break was actually the <img> tag's default display:block, which still applies even inside an inline link; it has been overridden to inline-block, and DOM measurement confirms the badge now sits on the same line as the preceding text. Synced across all eight language editions.
Corrected two swapped WeChat links in "Historical Stories & Oral Accounts" — the links for the "Sichuan Restaurant" Quanjude reprint and the "Fish-Fragrant Pork" entry had been attached to the wrong articles; both now point to the correct piece. Synced across all eight language editions.

4 September 2026

A real Zenodo DOI added to the About page, replacing the earlier "not yet deposited" note; an official DOI badge added alongside it; the English changelog brought current with the Chinese master; a new BagIt preservation package added; ten core pages given permanent Perma.cc snapshots

Long-term preservation: Zenodo DOI live — the site's core code snapshot has been deposited in the academic repository Zenodo, giving it a persistent identifier independent of this domain: doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22288725. The About page's archival note has been updated across all eight editions and no longer states that a deposit has not yet been made.
DOI badge added — an official Zenodo badge icon now sits beside the DOI link on the About page (self-hosted locally, to avoid weakening the site's Content-Security-Policy and to protect visitor privacy), synced across all eight editions.
This changelog brought current — the English edition had stalled at 8 August while the Chinese master kept updating daily; all 20 missing days (9 August through 4 September) have now been translated sentence by sentence, preserving every cited fact, date and footnote detail. Entry count and date sequence now match the Chinese master exactly.
Release tooling now produces a BagIt package — tools/make_release.py now generates a BagIt (RFC 8493) archival package alongside the existing .warc/.zip on every version release — a digital preservation packaging standard widely used by libraries and archival institutions, and the same format underlying Zenodo and Internet Archive, so it can be reused as-is for future submissions to repositories such as ScienceDB without repackaging separately for each one.
New card in "Long-Term Preservation & Web Archiving" — all eight language editions gained a matching explanation of the BagIt package's purpose and honest limitations.
New Perma.cc card in "Long-Term Preservation & Web Archiving" — the ten Simplified Chinese master pages with the highest concentration of citable evidence (About, Digital Archive, Life Journey, Lineage, Wisdom, Craft, 1959, the 37-page manuscript, the 1991 profile, and News) each received a permanent Perma.cc academic citation snapshot, serving as a second backup alongside the Wayback Machine. Synced across all eight language editions.
New release tool: tools/archive-to-perma.mjs — a command-line tool for generating Perma.cc snapshots on demand. It is deliberately not wired into the automated deployment pipeline: a Perma snapshot is meant to capture "this page at this precise citation moment," not to be refreshed on every release the way full-site backups are. The free tier's lifetime allowance of 10 links has already been used; generating further snapshots requires upgrading to a paid plan.

3 September 2026

Long-term preservation automation connected; a code-styling fix; the archive version number on the About page corrected and now kept in sync automatically

Long-term preservation automation — whenever the site's version changes, archival snapshots now sync automatically to Internet Archive (a full-site deposit) and to the Wayback Machine (a page-by-page capture of all 125 pages), with no manual step required. Code-styling fix — the command-line examples in the About page's file-integrity (fixity) section had been rendering in the browser's default font, out of step with the rest of the site's typography; switched to a consistent monospace code style.
Archive-note correction — the version number cited for the archive.org deposit on the About page had been left pointing at an earlier release; updated to the current version. From now on this line updates itself automatically whenever a deposit succeeds, rather than depending on someone noticing it has gone stale.

31 August 2026

Fixed the video-channel QR-code timeout so a cold start no longer misreports failure

Video-channel QR timing fix — the client's wait time for the retrieval service's response was raised from 20 seconds to 42, matching the 40-second budget the server itself reserves. A cold start (the headless browser waking from idle) often took more than 25 seconds, so the front end had been giving up before the server, moments later, actually retrieved the code.

29 August 2026

Fixed a missing navigation link on the "1991: What Was on His Mind" page

Navigation fix — on the "1991: What Was on His Mind" page, in the Simplified Chinese, English and Traditional Chinese editions, the "Lineage" entry in the People & Lineage dropdown was missing its <a href> tag and could not be clicked; now fixed.

28 August 2026

Five omitted pages added to sitemap.xml; version bumped v1.0.0 → v1.1.0 with a full-site snapshot, now including video, deposited to Internet Archive; the "Long-Term Preservation" section rewritten to reflect today's archival work

sitemap.xml — added five previously omitted pages (changelog.html/-en, education.html/-en/-zh-tw). Of the site's 254 HTML pages, the sitemap had listed only 120; of the 134-page gap, 129 are the known-damaged craft-lessons language variants deliberately left out, but these five were a genuine oversight, now fixed.
VERSION bumped to v1.1.0 — the first time the version number has actually moved with a substantive update (v1.0.0 had never changed since the site adopted versioning); the citation format on the About page updated across all eight editions.
Full-site snapshot regenerated (tools/make_release.py --with-video) — WARC 470MB / ZIP 447MB, the first time the 340MB of video material has been bundled in (previously excluded by default); content synced to today's state.
Internet Archive deposit substantially expanded — all 125 URLs in sitemap.xml submitted via Save Page Now (each page's text plus its embedded resources); the v1.1.0 full-site snapshot (with video) uploaded as its own item at archive.org/details/chensongru-com-v1.1.0, closing the previously noted gap that "large files such as video may not be captured by page snapshots." The "Internet Archive" section of the About page was updated to describe the 28 August 2026 bulk deposit of all 125 pages to the Wayback Machine and the new mechanism of generating a video-inclusive full-site snapshot with every release and depositing it to archive.org (then v1.1.0); the Honest Boundary note updated to distinguish page-by-page snapshots (video capture not guaranteed) from versioned deposits (video guaranteed included), synced across all eight editions.

27 August 2026

The 1992 award scene synced to all eight languages; About page repairs across every edition, including a fuller Korean translation and footnotes restored to their correct positions; two genuine content gaps filled on the Committee and Lineage pages; long badge labels begin to be split into a short pill plus a side note, with 33 instances converted and 32 generic labels added to the controlled vocabulary

Life page, "1992 · World Master Chefs Association Oriental Cuisine honour" — the on-the-scene details added on 26 August to the Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions (the red carpet, the list of officials present, the presenter's remarks through an interpreter, personally buttoning the ceremonial jacket, foreign chefs raising a toast), together with the three unreconciled discrepancies in footnotes 11/12 and footnote 11's precise citation, have now been translated into the remaining five editions — Traditional Chinese, English, French, German and Spanish. All eight editions are now aligned.
about-ko.html — body text expanded from 69% of the Chinese master (the most heavily abridged edition on the site) to 94%. Sections including "specific points of factual disagreement," "internal contradictions within the biography," "sources" and "privacy" had previously been compressed in translation; now filled in sentence by sentence against the Simplified Chinese master.
about-en/es/fr/ja/zh-tw.html — fixed footnotes 1 and 2, which had all been dumped together under the fifth card instead of sitting beside the fourth card's claims they actually support; readers clicking a footnote no longer land in the wrong place. The Spanish edition also had two truncated passages restored (the note about newly obtained first-hand material, and the specific example of family-supplied material still needing individual verification).
committee-ko.html — filled in the mention, in the "Xinjin District cooperation" entry, of Chen Tinglong's lecture and of chefs Wang Haiquan, Huang Ziyun and Luo Guorong, and, in the "successive discipleship ceremonies" entry, the professional backgrounds of Zhou Qinglong and Tang Shiyin and who witnessed the ceremony.
1959.html, all eight editions — fixed footnote 2 (Zhou Enlai's decision to found the restaurant), which had been placed after footnote 3 (the choice of site); readers can now match footnote 2 to the correct claim.
Fixed footnote 1 (the apprenticeship at Taoletian restaurant), which had been dumped at the end of the paragraph, and the reversed order of footnotes 2/3 (Zhou Enlai founding the state-guest kitchen / his reputation as a legend) and 4/5 (the sweet-and-sour crisp fish and twice-cooked pork examples, one positive and one negative) — all three fixed across eight editions, restored to the order of the claims in the Simplified Chinese master.
Fixed the reversed order of footnotes 1/2 (handling factional trouble in the kitchen / dealing with rebel-faction pressure during a foreign visit) and 6/7 (the apron instruction / personally teaching two signature dishes) — restored to the master's order across eight editions.
lineage-en/es/fr/de/ja/ko.html — found that the full career paragraph added to the Simplified Chinese master in July 2026 for Hao Zhenjiang (birth year and origin, professional title, apprenticeship under Zheng Shaowu, dishes created at Prince Gong's Mansion, service to national leaders including Stephen Hawking and Tsung-Dao Lee, the state banquet for Thailand's Princess Sirindhorn, and the debunking of a widely circulated false claim) had never been synced to these six editions, which still carried only the original one-line summary. Filled in against the master; the source citation updated to "independent source, China Cuisine Association, published 2021."
lineage, all eight editions — fixed three footnotes (footnote 1, on the founding of the Chen Tinglong committee; footnote 10, the source verifying Hao Zhenjiang's career; footnote 12, the source confirming Peng Yali's position), which had all been dumped together at the end of the page in a separate paragraph rather than sitting beside the claims they support.
assets/style.css gained a new .badge-note style class — the first step of a reviewer-suggested "split the label into fields" fix: pulling the long explanatory text that had been crammed inside a badge pill out to sit beside the short label in small type, leaving the pill itself carrying only the short designation.
lineage.html converted six instances as a pilot (the Hao Zhenjiang, Zheng Shaowu, Shi Yanping, Wu Xinman, Jiang Lizhong and Peng Yali entries), cutting six W1 warnings site-wide.
lineage, all eight editions, plus profile1991-de.html — mechanically split 33 instances of long labels crammed into a single pill (of the form "independent source (confirmed by media report…)") into short pill plus small-type side note; only applied where the prefix was already a registered short designation, with no change to content.
tools/termbase.json — registered 32 recurring, generic short labels (such as "physical certificate," "official recognition," "disciple's oral account," "compilation, not independently verified") into the controlled vocabulary across eight languages. One-off specific citations such as "single source · Zhangshang Ziyang / Du Xianfu (2018)" are, by the vocabulary's own rule, not registered and continue to display as long labels — that is by design, not a defect.

26 August 2026

On-the-scene detail added for the 1992 World Master Chefs award ceremony, with three unreconciled discrepancies noted; more scene detail added per Liu Zihua's original account, "A Record of the World Master Chefs Award"

Life page, "1992 · World Master Chefs Association Oriental Cuisine honour" — added on-the-scene details from disciple Liu Zihua's eyewitness account of the award day (the red carpet, the list of officials present, the presenter's remarks through an interpreter, personally putting on the ceremonial jacket, the banquet dishes prepared by Chen Songru himself), synced to the Japanese and Korean editions.
Footnote 12 sources — added three honestly juxtaposed points of disagreement: the presenter's title (chairman or secretary-general), who founded the society (a corporate founding or an individual one), and the term used for the honour (Oriental cuisine or Asian cuisine), synced to the Japanese and Korean editions.
Life page, same entry — checked against Liu Zihua's original text (Meipian and Beijing Evening News) and added Chen Songru's expression while greeting guests, the ceremonial detail of the chairman opening a gift box to reveal the jacket and personally buttoning it on him, and foreign chefs offering toasts of congratulation; footnote 11 now gives Liu's precise citation (Beijing Evening News, 23 March 2020, page 13, "Five-Colour Earth · Knowing Flavour" column), synced to the Japanese and Korean editions.

24 August 2026

Unified the official name of the Chen Songru State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Culture and Technique Expert Committee, stripping an honorific "Master" prefix the committee had been mistakenly using for itself (synced across eight languages)

About.html and its six other-language editions (disclaimer item 7), education.html and its Traditional Chinese edition (quotation), committee-en/es/fr.html (h1, meta description and body text — the French edition's founding paragraph had also dropped "maître de la cuisine sichuanaise des banquets d'État," now cleaned up), community.html and its German, Spanish, French and Traditional Chinese editions, index-es/fr.html, and lineage.html and its seven other-language editions: the committee's official name is now consistently given without the honorific prefix "Master"/"Maestro"/"maître"/"Küchenmeister." Left unchanged: quotations of external third-party article titles, captions describing physical banners or original newspaper images, Chen Songru's own historical honorific, and book-title citations — none of these verbatim quotations were altered.
news.html and its seven other-language editions: in a quoted WeChat article summary about the 1987 Singapore performance, "leading his disciples" was changed to "leading eight master chefs," matching the eight-chef delegation (six from the Sichuan Restaurant, two from Xiangshan Hotel; see Chen Songru's own memoir, archive.html footnote 1) already established on archive.html, life.html and singapore1987.html — no new fact introduced.
Re-ran the asset-fingerprinting script (tools/stamp_assets.py --go), fixing 100 pages whose CSS/JS version numbers had not been updated because the previous commit's fingerprinting step had been skipped — no content changed.
life.html and its seven other-language editions, footnote 12: added corroborating evidence that CCC's contact with China has continued — per an August 2010 China.com.cn report, CCC revisited Beijing that year for its annual event, hosted on the Chinese side by four chefs from the Great Hall of the People, noted in the report as eighteen years after its "first annual meeting held in Beijing in 1992." No claim is made about subsequent membership unconnected to Chen Songru himself.
Exhibition title unified: the Simplified Chinese edition had used "21 Days in the Lion City: the 1987 Singapore Photograph Exhibition" (in the title, h1, structured data, etc.) while the site navigation used "21 Days in the Lion City: the 1987 Photograph Exhibition" — now unified on the latter ("Singapore" was redundant, since "Lion City" already means Singapore); synced to the Traditional Chinese edition. Affected: singapore1987.html (six places including meta/og/twitter/structured data) and its Traditional Chinese edition (same six places), 1959.html and its Traditional Chinese edition, manuscript37.html and its Traditional Chinese edition, profile1991.html and its Traditional Chinese edition, and index.html and its Traditional Chinese edition — ten files, twenty instances in total. The German, English, Spanish and French editions had only ever named "Singapore" once and needed no change; the Japanese and Korean editions' navigation and page titles were already consistent and showed no such conflict.

23 August 2026

Corrected a page-number contradiction for clipping NC-006; added official information about the World Master Chefs Association to the 1992 award footnote (synced across eight languages)

archive.html and its eight editions, assets/collection-registry.csv, and seven assets/search-index-*.js files: the source page range for clipping NC-006 (Bauhinia Magazine) unified to "pages 68–69, two pages" (previously given as pages 68–70, contradicting both the "two pages" note and the image caption itself).
life.html and its seven other-language editions, footnote 12: added the society's official French name, Club des Chefs des Chefs (CCC), the internationally standard Chinese rendering "World Master Chefs Association," its website chefs-des-chefs.com, the one-seat-per-country rule with China's two-seat exception, and founder Gilles Bragard's own account of why he created it; the existing translation "世界名厨协会" (deriving from the original 1992 People's Daily report and the China Catering Services Yearbook 1993) was kept unchanged.

22 August 2026

Added a 1944 wedding photograph; strengthened the internal-agenda detail and citations for the 1992 World Master Chefs Association award entry on the Life page

"Life and Era," 1944 marriage to Jiang Mingshu entry — added a wedding photograph, synced across all eight editions.
Life page, 1992 "World Master Chefs Association" award entry: added corroborating detail from three same-day 1992 People's Daily reports (announcement, opening and closing) cross-verifying the meeting's internal schedule (opened 25 August, closed 29 August; secretary-general Gilles Bragard presented Wan Li with honorary membership and the ceremonial jacket), clarifying that the yearbook's "25–30 August" range covers surrounding events as well as the formal sessions; also clarified that 1987 membership and the 1992 award are two separate events. Synced across eight editions.

21 August 2026

The "show disputed only" timeline filter extended to all eight languages (previously Chinese-only); a backup source link added for the Chen Tinglong lineage article; yearbook detail added to the 1992 World Master Chefs Association entry, synced across eight languages; three links and images added to the Life-page timeline

"Show disputed only" timeline filter added to the seven other-language editions — it had gone live in Chinese only on 13 August 2026; now the button label and tooltip are translated, with the same functionality as the Chinese edition.
Lineage & Disciples: the Toutiao reprint (2023) of "Sichuan Cuisine Master Chen Tinglong and His Father Chen Songru's Culinary Legend" and the earlier WeChat original (published 8 July 2018, under an almost identical title) back each other up; a link to the original source has now been added, synced across all eight editions.
Life page, 1992 "World Master Chefs Association" Oriental Cuisine honour entry: added, per the China Catering Services Yearbook 1993, background on the occasion — it was the society's fifteenth annual meeting (held in Beijing, 25–30 August), founded in 1977 by Baccarat and L'Oréal, non-profit and non-political, membership limited to head chefs serving heads of state, with 37 formal members at the time; at the closing session Wan Li received all members, and the yearbook records that two chefs from Beijing's Great Hall of the People had already joined in 1987 (before the 1992 award) — indirect evidence bearing on the footnote 11 dispute between "the first" and "the only one that year." Synced across eight editions; the new footnotes 12/13 required renumbering the footnotes that followed.
The 1989/1991 published-books entries gained background on the 37-page manuscript, with a link to the manuscript exhibition.
The 5 November 1982 Sihanouk banquet entry gained a photograph of the physical menu, linked to the full menu on the Craft & Legacy page.

20 August 2026

14 new source links added to the news page, across the Life & Reference, History & Oral Accounts, and Lineage & Disciples sections, synced across eight languages

"Life & Reference," 4 new sources: Du Xianfu's "This National-Treasure Head of Sichuan Cuisine" (with a Zhangshang Ziyang reprint as backup); an expanded version of Liu Zihua's "Master Craftsman of Sichuan Cuisine" (adding detail on kitchen elders including Huang Shaoqing, the three visits to Zhongnanhai, the 1969/1973 closure and reopening, the 1983 autumn Sihanouk birthday banquet, the 1985 trip to Heilongjiang Institute of Commerce, and dandan noodles in autumn 1987); "Biographical Records of Modern Sichuan Cuisine Master Chefs (IX)"; and Zuo Xiaotian's "Sichuan Cuisine Master Chen Songru."
"History & Oral Accounts," 3 new sources: "In Tribute to the National-Treasure Head of Sichuan Cuisine, Chen Songru"; Hu Xiaoyuan's column "Traditional and Modern Ways with Home-Style Sea Cucumber"; and "The Sea-Cucumber Dishes Sichuan Cuisine Master Chen Songru Cooked for National Leaders" — three sources; also added a backup link for the Baijiahao article "Deng Xiaoping Often Came to This Restaurant."
"Lineage & Disciples," 1 new source: "Learning by Example from a National-Treasure Chef — an Interview with Sichuan Cuisine Master Chen Tinglong."
"Heritage & Donation Activities," 1 new source: "Officially Announced! Ziyang Adds 15 New Municipal-Level Intangible Heritage Items" (with a Ziyang Culture & Tourism reprint as backup); also added a Ziyang Daily backup link for the Reference.com article on Chen Tinglong and his father.

18 August 2026

Nine Singapore newspaper-database page images added to the clippings section; corrected the wording of a 2019 committee-founding news item; a third corroborating source added for the "21 Days in the Lion City" exhibition — a Straits Times bilingual profile whose Chinese headline reads "Sichuan's national-treasure chef"

"Original Clipping Scans" section gained 9 page images (news-10 through news-18) from the NewspaperSG newspaper database (Nanyang·Sin Chew Business Times, Shin Min Daily News and Lianhe Zaobao, Straits Times, 4 August – 9 September 1987), captioned to note copyright rests with the original publishers under the NewspaperSG framework, and linked to the corresponding archive records NC-007 through NC-015. Synced across all eight editions.
The 18 clippings in "Original Clipping Scans" re-sorted by publication date (1987.8.4 → 1987.9.9 → 1991.12 → 1999.9.18, with the undated Chen Tinglong interview pages placed last). Synced across all eight editions.
News-page caption corrected — from "Chen Tinglong, Zheng Shaowu and others were invited to become committee members of the [organisational structure of the] committee" to "…named specially-appointed advisors of the committee." Synced across all eight editions.
Singapore 1987 page, footnote 1 (the independent source for "China's national-treasure Sichuan chef"): added a third corroborating original — a bilingual profile in The Straits Times (Singapore), 11 August 1987, page 4, whose Chinese headline reads literally "Sichuan's national-treasure chef," matching the honorific exactly. A corresponding quotation card was added to the highlights section, and the "1987.8.28 · closing" entry on the itinerary was updated with this new source.

17 August 2026

Higher-resolution clipping scans for "21 Days in the Lion City"; the 9 new clippings restored to unwatermarked originals; specific newspaper sources added to the venue-tour captions; a 15th archive record catalogued and each of the 9 clippings linked to its record; a Traditional Chinese terminology correction; a new source in Lineage & Disciples; two supporting citations cleaned up; a fortieth video-channel clip added; a WeChat citation date format unified; video-channel covers rematched; and a recurring caption bug fixed

Eight existing clippings replaced with higher-resolution originals (Shin Min Daily News / Lianhe Wanbao / Lianhe Zaobao, 4 August – 9 September 1987) — image content and captions unchanged.
Added a ninth clipping: The Straits Times' bilingual interview of 11 August 1987, filling the previous gap of only Chinese-language coverage; the page caption updated accordingly to "Chinese- and English-language press."
The nine 1987 newspaper originals restored to clean, unwatermarked images — news-10 through news-18 are copyright of Singapore's NewspaperSG newspaper database and are not subject to this site's own "Baiwei Songru" watermark scheme.
Venue-tour caption updated with the specific newspaper source — where it had previously said only "an English-language newspaper report," it now cites The Straits Times, 11 August 1987, page 4, bilingual interview, matching the clipping displayed alongside it; synced across seven editions.
"Digital Archive" gained record NC-015 (The Straits Times, 11 August 1987 interview), and each of the nine "21 Days in the Lion City" clippings was individually linked to its corresponding archive record; synced across eight editions.
Traditional Chinese terminology correction, site-wide: "數字檔案" unified to the Taiwan-standard "數位檔案" (previously only archive-zh-tw.html itself had it right; 33 other files, including the navigation, had it wrong).
Added documentation for a WeChat article's supporting image (29 September 2019): the image shows Chen Tinglong, Zheng Shaowu and others invited to join the organisational-structure committee of the newly formed World Chinese Cuisine Federation's Sichuan Cuisine Industry Committee; the article body itself does not name them, and the note makes clear the information comes from the image rather than the text.
Image-documentation date reduced to year only — for this record, the date changed from "29 September 2019" to "2019," synced across eight editions.
Citation title corrected to "founding ceremony" — corrected, across eight editions, from a title referring to a membership list to the article's actual title, "Founding Ceremony of the World Chinese Cuisine Federation's Sichuan Cuisine Industry Committee and Sichuan Cuisine Entrepreneurs' Conference Successfully Held" (the note text below left unchanged).
Added a video-channel clip by Song Xingtong, expanding the collection to forty — "Video Channel Highlights: Chen Tinglong and State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine" gained a clip published 14 March 2023 by Song Xingtong (coverage of a Chengdu conference by the provincial food-research-association education centre), inserted fifth in chronological order; titles and summaries updated in all eight languages.
WeChat citation date format unified — for "Founding Ceremony…Successfully Held," the date suffix changed from "2019年" to "2019," matching the format used for other entries (Sohu, Reference.com, etc.); the Japanese edition kept its own house convention of "2019年" unchanged; the other seven languages synced.
Video-channel highlight covers rematched — the cover images for the 40 featured clips were recropped in the newly reorganised source-file numbering order, fixing cases where a cover had previously been mismatched with its original source, and a few historical entries that had referenced missing source files.
Fixed the video-channel note reverting to showing an expired-QR-code caveat — the passage removed previously (about the two-hour QR expiry, re-fetching, and the long account list) had reappeared; the root cause was that the text had not actually been removed from the config file, so it was written back in when the page was regenerated for the new clip. The config file itself is now fixed, so it will not reappear on future regenerations.

15 August 2026

Unified the "eight mental models" wording across every language; added a missing navigation entry for the 1991 exhibition; fixed a navigation dropdown being cut off by the search box

"Eight mental models" wording unified site-wide — after last month's addition of an eighth model, only the visible page headings had been updated in each language; the home-page card, the body-text lede, and the meta/og/twitter/DC/JSON-LD descriptions still said "seven" — 29 instances across 14 files (Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish all affected). Each corrected to "eight" per language. The Korean 1959-page phrase "일곱 가지" ("seven kinds") refers to seven cold dishes and is unrelated to the mental models; left unchanged.
Added the missing navigation entry for the 1991 exhibition — the "Online Exhibition & Research" dropdown was missing "1991: What Was on His Mind." Of the 125 site pages carrying this dropdown, 28 were missing it, all in the non-Chinese editions of the index, 1959, manuscript37 and singapore1987 page families (the entry had only been added to the Simplified Chinese editions originally). Filled in using each language's existing translation; verified afterward with zero gaps remaining.
Fixed a navigation dropdown being cut off by the search box — the site header's z-index was 50, while the in-page search box was 60. Setting the dropdown menu's own z-index to 9999 had no effect, because it sits inside the header's stacking context, whose own z-index caps it at 50 — so hovering over it, the menu was half-obscured by the search box. Fixed by raising the header's z-index to 200.

14 August 2026

Accessibility and caching fixes: the Craft-route heading recoloured for contrast, heading hierarchy connected site-wide, small mobile text enlarged; image-cache backfill switched to a server-side metadata edit; a mobile recipe-page menu misalignment fixed; image cache headers completed at the origin (CDN-side still pending); five new sources added; a "George H. W. Bush" discrepancy downgraded on new evidence; three items added to the Life page; CDN Brotli compression enabled; the "husband-and-wife lung slices" dish gained its origin story, character description and English name; the Wisdom page gained an eighth mental model and strengthened models three and six; the 1992 award-video detail (making mapo tofu) added to the Life page and, as speculation, to the Wisdom page; a Traditional Chinese decorative-character fix; dish-card line breaks balanced; "1991" added to navigation on all 253 pages; the brush-script font subset extended to cover the character "捌"; the mini-programme brought up to date with this month's changes; and 19 more instances of "twenty days" found and corrected

"Learn the Craft" route heading had insufficient contrast: it used --gold (#ab8143), only 2.9:1 against the beige background, short of WCAG AA's 4.5:1 (the other two routes measured 6.03 and 5.72). Switched to --gold-ink (#6b4d26), a colour already defined in the stylesheet for "small text on a light background" but never actually wired in.
Heading hierarchy connected site-wide: 375 footer section headings changed from h5 to h2 (previously jumping straight from the body's h2 to h5); 64 headings on the 1959 exhibition page changed from h4 to h3; on 128 recipe pages, section headings raised from h3 to h2 and step headings lowered from h4 to h3 (previously jumping from h1 straight to h3 with no h2 in between). Screen-reader users navigating by heading no longer hit a broken outline; font sizes were pinned so the visible appearance is unchanged.
Three mobile body-text sizes were too small: the hero subtitle (11.2 → 12.8px), the statistic captions (10.88 → 12.48px), and the route-duration text (11.2 → 12.48px).
Image-cache backfill switched to a server-side metadata edit — the original job re-uploaded all 442MB of images just to change one response header, ran at roughly 50 kB/s, and was still only 10% done when it hit its 40-minute timeout; the job failed and no cache headers changed. Now uses coscmd copy -d Replaced to make the change inside Tencent Cloud without re-transferring bytes, plus a new step that spot-checks the live response headers and fails the job if the change did not take.
Fixed three misaligned mobile menu items — on 128 recipe pages, the page-level mobile styling block sat before the base rules, so at equal specificity it was overridden by a later align-items:center rule, centring the three items with a dropdown while the rest stayed left-aligned. Moved to the end so it wins; all six items now share the same left edge.
Image cache headers: all 400 image objects on the COS origin now carry public, max-age=15552000 (server-side metadata edit, no re-transfer of bytes; 51 objects failed to take effect on the first pass, zero on the second). Visitors will not see the effect yet, though: the CDN has its own edge-caching rule that rewrites Cache-Control — testing after a fresh origin fetch still returned 604800 — so the "edge cache expiry" setting needs to be changed in the Tencent Cloud CDN console to follow the origin.
Guard against skipped asset fingerprinting: CSS/JS cache-busting relies on a content-hash ?v= parameter in the HTML, but the fingerprinting script had always had to be run by hand; skipping it meant a live change would silently fail to reach visitors, with no error. Now enforced as a required step in the deployment process, and the hash is computed on LF-normalised content so Windows and CI compute the same value.
Five new sources added to the news page (eight languages, inserted by publication date): Beijing Evening Online's "Deng Xiaoping Often Came Here…" (4 Jan 2018), Du Xianfu's Zhangshang Ziyang piece (14 Sep 2018), Ziyang Dazhong's coverage of the centenary symposium (7 Sep 2021), Xicheng District's "Xicheng Dianjing" column feature "Red Memories at the Sichuan Restaurant" (21 Nov 2021), and People's Daily Sichuan's "From 'Heaven' to 'Stomach'" (16 Dec 2025). Each entry's note states where the source conflicts with material already confirmed on this site — inclusion is not endorsement.
Backup link added for "A Record of the World Master Chefs Award" — the Baijiahao copy the boss supplied and the Beijing Tourism Network copy already on the site are the same article (by Liu Zihua, originally in Beijing Evening News' "Five-Colour Earth" column), so no separate entry was created; the two are listed as backup links for the same piece, so that if one is taken down the other still resolves.
Life page "George H. W. Bush" item downgraded from disputed — previously flagged as unconfirmed because "Bush never served as Secretary of State," which contradicted the 1987 restaurant press release's mention of "Secretary of State Vance." Beijing Evening Online (2018) records that Bush served as the second head of the US Liaison Office in Beijing from 1974, for 13 months, and that the Liaison Office regularly hosted banquets at the Sichuan Restaurant — not incompatible with Vance's tenure as Secretary of State, since the two could have dined there at different times. This moved the item from "internal contradiction within a single source" to "different sources, not actually in conflict" — still not a first-hand record, though.
Added a 3 August 2024 Jintang plaque-award entry to the Committee page, and corrected the section's ordering — verifying the actual publication date of each 2024 entry to place them correctly turned up that "founding of the Sichuan Cuisine Culture Research Institute" (29 April 2024) had been placed after a 17 November 2024 entry; now moved into position.
Three new items added to the Life page (eight languages): (1) a childhood illness from years of overwork, untreated for lack of money, that left permanent leg disability (Zhangshang Ziyang / Du Xianfu, 2018, single source); (2) the scale of the initial 1959 selection for Beijing — over a hundred senior chefs put forward from Chongqing, Chengdu, Zigong, Nanchong, Yibin, Xinjin, Luzhou and elsewhere (same source); (3) a 21 January 1984 contribution to Beijing Evening News' "Home Cooking" column (captioned in Liu Zihua's piece). The same Zhangshang Ziyang article contains several other points at odds with confirmed material on this site (dating "160 Authentic Sichuan Dishes" to a 2002 Jindun edition, giving his age at death as 72, and putting six chefs on the Singapore trip) — none of these were adopted. The "ceremonial jacket" detail from the 1992 award was already on the site and not duplicated.
CDN Brotli compression enabled: previously gzip only; now Brotli preferred with gzip fallback, and svg/txt brought into the compressed set. Only the Algorithms field of the existing rule was changed, everything else left as is — the live configuration uses a RuleType/RulePaths structure different from what the initial draft assumed, so a read-only check came first to avoid disturbing the rule.
"Husband-and-wife lung slices" (eight languages): the recipe card gained the dish's origin and character as recorded in the manuscript book — in the 1930s a Chengdu couple surnamed Guo made a living selling beef-lung snacks, hence the dish's name from the couple working together; they began as a street stall and later opened a shop, refining their ingredients and method over time; the finished dish is noted for its appealing colour, tender texture, and numbing, spicy, fragrant crispness. Also added the English name "Stewed sliced Ox's lung and beef," and, per the source, changed "head, skin" back to "head-skin" in the offal ingredient list. Ingredients and method were not changed: the newly added material matches what the site already had item for item (2,500g each of beef and offal, 175g each of chilli oil and crisp roasted peanuts, etc.), and the method remains split into the existing three steps (prep and blanching, braising, finishing the sauce) under "Learn from the Old Masters."
Added mental model eight, "A craft has to be published, not just handed down to those nearby" (eight languages): of the previous seven models, the two about succession ("those who copy me die, those who make it their own live"; "succession isn't a matter of instructions, it's a matter of one dish, one skill") were both about disciples; this one is about the public. The evidence is a sustained, two-decade, cross-medium record of publishing: from Worker's Daily in 1981, through China Cuisine, China Pictorial (published abroad in foreign-language editions) and Economic Daily, to Radio Beijing's international service in 1989; a 21 January 1984 contribution to Beijing Evening News' "Home Cooking" column; and two books plus a roughly 37-page manuscript from around 1980. Its limits are stated honestly too: this pattern is this site's own inference from the frequency of his behaviour — Chen Songru himself never articulated it — and the publication list itself comes from conference remarks, recorded only by year and outlet, not individually verified.
Model three, "the diner comes first," gained a feedback loop — previously stated only as a principle, with no mechanism. Per a Beijing Xicheng District column, Chen Yi routinely scored dishes and had the scores posted in the kitchen for the chefs to see (pineapple fermented-rice soup, 100; braised duck breast with soy pulp, 98; dry-braised fish head, 95), and told them "the waitstaff are half a chef too." Noted that this feedback mechanism was an external requirement introduced by Chen Yi, not something Chen Songru devised himself.
Model six, "combining self-interest with helping others," gained a piece of unfavourable evidence: the childhood illness that went untreated for lack of money and left him with permanent leg disability, making heavy farm labour difficult (single source). If true, taking up cooking looks less like weighing two benefits against each other and more like there simply being few other paths open — when the range of choice narrows to almost one option, calling it a "calculated decision" is a stretch. Included honestly even though it counts against the model.
Life page, 1992 entry, added a fact (eight languages): under the World Master Chefs Association's rules, recipients of the honour were required to wear the ceremonial jacket and be filmed working, as a permanent record; per disciple Liu Zihua, who was present, what he cooked on camera was mapo tofu.
"Wisdom" page, "the dish reflects the character" section, added a curatorial note (eight languages): what he chose to cook at the moment of his highest honour was not a showpiece like oil-net lantern chicken but the plainest of home-style dishes — read alongside "the dish reflects the character," it looks very much like an unshowy man keeping to his own measure. But the original source only says he "began making mapo tofu," without saying who chose the dish — he may have chosen it himself, or the society or the film crew may have specified it. This site labels it explicitly as curatorial speculation, not evidence of his character; a new .curator style (a left-hand rule plus a pale background) was created so speculation is visually distinct from "evidence" and "limits."
Traditional Chinese "Wisdom" page decorative-character fix: 貳參陸 changed to 贰叁陆, matching the site's standing rule that decorative characters use simplified forms (the other seven characters already did).
Dish-card line breaks balanced — added text-wrap:balance to dish names and subtitles. On testing, the card, dish name and subtitle were all already centred (text-align: center), so centring itself was not the problem — the apparent "off-centre" look came from line breaks: in narrow cards, phrases like "served with fanfare · manuscript pairing" or "national classic · standardised heat control" left only one or two characters on the last line. balance lets the browser split the two lines to roughly even lengths.
"1991: What Was on His Mind" added to navigation site-wide: previously present on 17 of the Simplified Chinese main pages but missing from 16 recipe pages; the seven non-Chinese editions' navigation had it nowhere at all (the five instances found earlier were body-text buttons, not navigation). Added to 201 pages in total; afterward, all 253 site pages carry it, with 100% coverage in every language.
Local brush-script subset gained the character "捌" (eight) — after mental model eight was added, its ordinal character was outside the coverage of ma-shan-zheng-subset-supplement.woff2 (which previously stopped at "柒," seven), so it fell back to the system font in Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Japanese and on desktop, out of step with the look of the first seven ordinals. Regenerated the subset from the SIL OFL-licensed Ma Shan Zheng font (37 code points, 17,236 bytes) and extended the CSS unicode-range to match.
Font URL given a version parameter — the fingerprinting script only processes CSS/JS references inside HTML, not url('fonts/…') references inside CSS itself, and the font's cache header is set to 180 days; left unaddressed, users who had already visited would keep serving the old font for half a year. Added a content hash to the font URL and noted the constraint in the stylesheet.
Mini-programme brought up to date with August's site changes — the WeChat mini-programme "Baiwei Songru" gained mental model eight, "a craft has to be published, not just handed down to those nearby" (models now read eight instead of seven throughout); the 1933 life entry gained the same background — childhood illness leaving permanent leg disability, farm labour difficult, cooking one of the few paths open (single source, Zhangshang Ziyang); and the 1992 entry gained the note about the ceremonial-jacket work video, with mapo tofu as the dish cooked on camera. Model eight required an extra footnote in the mini-programme specifically — the web page keeps the citation and its limits in the card body, but the mini-programme card is a single sentence, and copying it as-is would have made an unsourced assertion, so the citation and the three caveats were moved into a footnote instead. Only the fact of the mapo tofu was carried over, not the interpretation: the web page's curatorial reading is explicitly marked as speculation (the source does not say who chose the dish), and the mini-programme, with no room for that kind of passage, records only the fact and notes that no inference about his character should be drawn from it.
Nineteen more instances of "twenty days" found and fixed — the 8 August pass that unified the 1987 Singapore run to 21 days had only searched for phrasings like "twenty days," missing three other variants: numeral forms (20日間 / 20일간 / 20 Tage / 20 días / 20 jours / 20-day), the German compound zwanzigtägig, and the Korean phonetic spelling 이십 일간/이십일. This pass fixed all 19 instances, across the eight-language Life page, the English/Japanese/Korean Digital Archive, the English/German/Korean Story Gallery, and the German/Japanese/Korean editions of the 1991 and Singapore exhibitions. One Korean Singapore-exhibition instance had been self-contradictory — the unit heading already read "21일간" while the body text, right next to it, still read "꼬박 이십일 동안" (a full twenty days). Two categories deliberately left unchanged: the committee page's eight-language quotation of the commemorative documentary's subtitle, which literally says "the performance lasted twenty days" — changing a quotation would falsify it; and the changelog entries describing this renaming itself, for the same reason. This pass's check script added a positive control — first confirming it could find the eight known quotations on the committee page (proving the pattern actually covers every language's phrasing), before trusting what it reported as the remaining count, so that "the script ran successfully" would not be mistaken for "the sweep is clean."

13 August 2026

A "show disputed only" timeline filter added; a formal statement of metadata standards; version numbers and full-site snapshots (WARC + ZIP) introduced, with a full-site PDF export; two new cataloguing cards added to the About page explaining how to cite a version and which public standards cataloguing follows; all eight languages launched together, with no Chinese-only corner left over; two QR-popup status messages reworded to a standard phrasing; and faster loading — Chinese pages preload body fonts, static assets gain long cache headers

Added a "Show disputed only (5 entries)" filter to the timeline: of 33 entries, five carry a genuine disagreement across sources (year of Party membership, the date of the first tasting meal, 1961, the year of the Korean decoration, and the "the first" wording). These had previously been scattered across 72 years of entries, findable only by reading the whole thing start to finish — and what an archive most needs to make visible is precisely the place where it admits it does not know.
The filter works by checking, at runtime, whether an entry carries a disputed marker, rather than tagging entries individually: any newly added disputed entry will be picked up automatically, with no one needing to remember to come back and tag it. A mechanism that depends on someone remembering will eventually be missed.
"About This Site → How to Cite" gained a "Metadata Standards" card: states plainly that cataloguing follows the field semantics of three public standards — Dublin Core, ISAD(G) and PREMIS. This was not a new practice so much as a disclosure of an existing one — without saying so, a researcher has no way to know how to read fields like "source" or "rights."
The same card honestly notes two respects in which the site is not fully compliant: date fields vary in granularity ("1980s" alongside "1987.8.4"), and the rights field has not yet been reduced to a fixed, controlled vocabulary; it also states that the five-level "evidence strength" scale is this site's own invention and belongs to none of the above standards.
The site adopted semantic versioning, starting at v1.0.0. Each substantive update is tagged with a new version and produces two snapshots — a .warc (preserving HTTP headers, replayable) and a .zip (unpack it and the whole site is there, no player needed) — so a researcher can cite "v1.0.0" rather than an address that might change.
Added a full-site PDF export (tools/make_pdf.py): 17 chapters, 298 pages, bookmarked, with searchable and selectable text. Built by printing each page with a headless browser and binding the results, not by stitching together screenshots — a screenshotted "offline edition" has text that cannot be selected, searched, or read by a screen reader, which is no use to a researcher.
Honestly disclosed two limitations: the snapshots have not yet been deposited in a DOI-issuing academic repository such as Zenodo, so there is not yet a persistent identifier independent of this domain; and the .warc file, synthesised from static source files, has not been validated by an independent WARC tool (neither wget nor warcio would install on this machine) — for strict replay, rely on the .zip or the Wayback deposit.
"Citing a Specific Version" card: explains what the semantic version number means, what each of the two snapshots (.warc and .zip) is, and how to write an academic citation; honestly notes that the snapshots are not yet deposited with a DOI-issuing repository and have not been validated by an independent WARC tool.
"Metadata Standards" card: maps the site's cataloguing fields to three public standards — Dublin Core, ISAD(G) and PREMIS — while noting that date-field granularity is inconsistent, the rights field has no controlled vocabulary, and the five-level "evidence strength" scale is the site's own invention, not part of any of the three standards.
Both cards were written into all eight editions — Simplified and Traditional Chinese, English, Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish — at the same time. Writing them in Chinese only first would have been caught by the content-volume gate (E7) — and rightly so: this site does not accept a reader in one language seeing less than the others.
Two status messages in the QR-code popup reworded: "Can't fetch the code right now…" changed to "Unable to fetch the QR code at the moment. Please click below…"; "This code has expired — close this and click the cover again for a new one" changed to "The QR code has expired. Please close this and click the cover again." Changed in both Simplified and Traditional Chinese.
A site-wide sweep for colloquial wording found only this one instance needing a change. Every other hit fell into one of three categories left deliberately alone: historical changelog entries (changing the wording after the fact would falsify the record), the Q&A demo's simulated dialogue in Chen Songru's own voice (that is the character's register), and disciples' oral-account quotations (not a word of a quotation may be changed).
Testing found that CSS, JS and font files carried no Cache-Control header at all — only an ETag. A returning visitor still had to send a request and wait for a 304 response for every file, and on a connection where a single round trip takes about half a second, a second visit was nearly as slow as the first. Now set by content-fingerprint tier: CSS/JS carry a ?v= fingerprint and change address whenever they change, set to 180 days; images, which are only ever added to and never modified, get a one-time addition of a one-year header.
Chinese-language pages now preload the body and heading fonts in <head>. The previous chain was serial — download HTML, parse it, download CSS, parse that, only then discover which font is needed, then download the font — wasting a full round trip. Applied only to the Simplified and Traditional Chinese pages; the English, French, German and Spanish pages use Latin script, and preloading Chinese fonts for them would be pure waste.
Corrected a stale comment in passing: the deployment script said "CSS still uses long-lived caching," which was simply wrong — there had never been a long cache in the first place.

11 August 2026

History & Oral Accounts gained a two-part piece, "A Garden in the Capital, a Pearl of Sichuan Cuisine: the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant," whose second part corroborates directly against this site's own holdings in three places; a correction of the previous entry — both parts are now confirmed as published in 2023, replacing the earlier "date not given, inferred" note

"History & Oral Accounts": added a two-part piece, "A Garden in the Capital, a Pearl of Sichuan Cuisine: the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant" (WeChat, undated at first; a 2023 piece, "My Master Chen Songru — Xiao Jianming's Interview," cites it as an earlier work, so it was dated no later than 2023 and placed between the site's existing 2021 and 2023 entries). Compiled from the oral accounts of several practitioners, including Jiang Xueyun, Luo Songbai, Xiao Jianming and Hua Wentong.
Part one records the winter 1958 Central Economic Conference at which Sichuanese officials including Chen Yi mentioned to Zhou Enlai that they had gone a long time without home-style Sichuan food in Beijing; the premier immediately proposed a joint Beijing–Sichuan venture, built in a little over five months and opened 1 October 1959. Its first manager, Chu Tugen, transferred in from Chongqing; Luo Guorong recommended Huang Shaoqing; Chen Songru transferred in from Duoyi in Chengdu as convenor and first head of the kitchen. It also gives a detailed restoration of the four-courtyard layout (including the distinction of use between the "third-north" and "third-northwest" courtyards, and that Chen Songru himself lived in the rear courtyard), the account of over 1,200 people surrounding and ransacking the restaurant during the Cultural Revolution, its closure at the end of 1969 and reopening as "Chengdu Restaurant" in March 1973, and the life of dim sum chef Chen Jingzhen.
Part two, three points corroborated directly against this site's own holdings: (1) it juxtaposes three menus — Chen Songru's own handwritten menu of November 1982, Xiao Jianming's 1999 transcription, and the version in Liu Zihua's book — noting that the first two match closely while the third diverges considerably, and clarifies that "red-braised ox head" and "braised ox-head square" are the same dish, as are the two namings for clear-steamed soft-shelled turtle; (2) it corrects Liu Zihua's claim that the banquet was held in the "third-northwest" courtyard — that courtyard held only one table, inconsistent with the seven tables actually used; per Chen Tinglong and Xiao Jianming, it should be the "great north hall" of the third courtyard, which matches this site's own holding, Chen Songru's handwritten menu, reading "banquet of seven tables held in the great north hall of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant"; (3) it corrects the claim that dandan noodles were made by Chen Jingzhen — the dim sum that day was actually made by Xue Honggui, Li Xiuju and others.
Not included: part one's footnote gives "Chen Songru, 1920–1993 … transferred to the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant in 1958," both the birth year and the transfer year being commonly circulated errors (this site follows 7 December 1921 and 1959, per the 1993 workplace eulogy and other confirming documents); per the site's standing policy, incorrect versions are not listed within an entry.
"History & Oral Accounts": the two-part "A Garden in the Capital" piece, previously noted as "publication year not given, inferred no later than 2023 based on the related series," was confirmed by the boss against the text itself as published in 2023; both entries now state the year directly. Position unchanged (still between the 2021 and 2023 groups). Synced across eight languages. Why this was worth fixing: an inferred year and a confirmed year look the same on the page, but carry different confidence — once confirmed, readers should not have to carry the qualifier "inferred" on our behalf.

10 August 2026

Video-channel viewing switched to a tap-the-cover QR popup (option B); a WeChat-internal limitation disclosed and later narrowed after further testing; mobile viewing steps simplified after real-device testing; step-level detail added for two dish adaptations; the Cultural Revolution episode and the North Korean training-delegation size added to the Life page, with an over-specific passage later withdrawn; two banquet menus added; several founding-era dishes and banquet series added to the Craft page; two Lineage entries added; a "1959" opening-day detail and the restaurant's later relocations added; a video-channel clip swapped for a live one; a missing German dish card filled in; the privacy statement corrected to disclose that IP addresses are in fact logged; a new source added and then partly withdrawn once its errors were identified; and two Craft-page cards trimmed back to proper summary length

Tapping a cover no longer navigates away; the page now pops up that video's QR code directly. The code is fetched live from the site's own retrieval service, which pulls it from WeChat's official page at the moment of the click — it is not a stored image, since the credential embedded in the official code is single-use and, in testing, expires after about two hours; the popup carries a countdown, and once it lapses a prompt invites the reader to click the cover again for a fresh code.
The biggest improvement is inside WeChat itself: previously, opening the site inside WeChat and clicking a cover produced "This page cannot be opened right now," locking those users out entirely; now the popup's code can simply be long-pressed and scanned via "Recognise QR Code in Image." The instructional text changed from "cannot be opened" to a normal set of steps.
Two fallbacks were kept: if the code has not returned after 20 seconds, the popup's "fetch the code via WeChat's official page" option is the original route, and remains available; and with JavaScript disabled, the cover link itself still points to the official page, so the popup is progressive enhancement only. Also allowed the long-press context menu specifically on the QR-code image — the site's blanket anti-download protection blocks right-click and long-press menus everywhere else, but on mobile, "save to photos" and "recognise QR code in image" both rely on that same event.
Live testing after launch: both desktop and mobile browsers produce a working, scannable code, but opening the site inside WeChat and long-pressing to recognise it triggers WeChat's own "Your WeChat version is too low to use this feature" message — a limitation of the WeChat client itself, which this site cannot work around.
The instructional text's "viewing this page inside WeChat" note now states this limitation and points readers to open the page in their phone's browser instead — the note should not promise something that fails on some devices. Both languages updated.
Noted that this may be device- and WeChat-version-specific; only one phone has been tested so far, so it cannot be said to hold for every WeChat build.
"Viewing this page in a mobile browser" simplified from a four-step process (long-press to save to photos → open WeChat → choose the photo from the album → recognise) to the boss's tested, shorter route: long-press the QR code, copy it into WeChat, then choose "Recognise QR Code in Image." Two fewer steps. Both languages updated.
Retested on iOS: long-press-to-recognise inside WeChat opened the video correctly — the earlier "WeChat version too low" message, seen on HarmonyOS's native WeChat, turns out to be specific to that client, not a failure of the approach generally.
Instructional text adjusted accordingly: the caveat was downgraded from a body-text warning to a light footnote, stating that it tests working on iOS, naming HarmonyOS's native WeChat as the one known exception, and pointing to the mobile-browser route as an alternative. A blanket "doesn't work on some versions" would needlessly scare off most users who can, in fact, use it. Both languages updated.
The home-style sea cucumber card gained a step-level list of modifications: compared with its Chengdu original, "bean-paste sea cucumber," the changes are dropping the bean-sprout bed, cutting the sea cucumber into strips instead, dicing rather than mincing the meat, and braising for 30–40 minutes until the sauce reduces to a glossy finish with no cornstarch thickening; unchanged are the core ingredient and the home-style flavour profile. Also noted that dropping the bean sprouts was a matter of occasion — a bean-sprout bed looked unrefined on a banquet table — quite different in kind from Zhu De's instruction not to add less chilli "to suit the palate."
The dry-braised fish card gained the motivation and method behind its adaptation: the Chengdu original's problem was "not distinctive enough, the flavour profile too faint" — without the dried chillies it becomes indistinguishable from preserved-vegetable fish. The fix: fry doubanjiang and aged doubanjiang with ginger, spring onion and garlic to make a thick red sauce, then braise the fish until the sauce reduces to a glossy finish — a technique later known in Beijing as "oil-cube dry-braised fish" or "Daqian dry-braised fish." The reason for the change was not that the original tasted bad, but that the two dishes were too similar to tell apart.
This is the first time the site has described the line between "adaptation" and "losing its identity" down to the level of technique rather than just principle. The French edition's Craft page lacks a card for home-style sea cucumber and the German edition lacks one for dry-braised fish (pre-existing gaps); this update honestly skipped rather than forced these languages, to be handled separately.
The Cultural Revolution entry gained specific detail (per Chen Songru's own 1988 handwritten manuscript): Jiang Qing declared at the Great Hall of the People that the Sichuan Restaurant was "Li Jingquan's spy outpost," alleging that chefs tapping their ladles were sending telegraph signals and that waitstaff's high heels were signalling devices, and that a radio was hidden inside the floor and walls; that night over 1,200 people surrounded the restaurant, allowing exits but no entries, and the search damaged the floor of the third courtyard's north hall and the walls of rooms 202 and 203, finding nothing; Party secretary Jiang Xianmin and manager Chu Tugen were detained by the Ministry of Public Security; the restaurant relocated about a year later to the fourth floor of the Yongdingmen service school, was formally shut down at the end of 1969, and Sichuanese staff were sent back to Sichuan. Previously the site had only a single line about "pressure from rebel factions" — the process itself had been blank.
The three visits to Zhongnanhai entry gained the size of the North Korean training delegation: two groups, fourteen and then eighteen — totalling the 32 already recorded — led by Chen Songru; on the third visit in 1986, the final day involved a mutual technique exchange, with the North Korean chefs also cooking four dishes.
Withdrawn: the specific Cultural Revolution detail added in the previous update (the crowd size, the search and damage) did not sit well with the site's restrained tone and was rolled back across all eight languages. The North Korean delegation's fourteen-plus-eighteen breakdown was kept — that is a finer breakdown of an already-recorded total of 32, not a piece of sensational detail.
The Li Zongren homecoming banquet entry on the Life page gained the full menu: a cold-dish platter ("brocade chicken") plus eight side dishes, eight hot dishes (superior bird's-nest soup, three-treasure braised abalone, oil-net "purse" chicken, home-style minced sea cucumber, scallop with yellow chive, Sichuan braised ox-head square, fish-fragrant prawns, clear-steamed hilsa), a sweet dish of eight-treasure sweet-potato purée, a soup course of clear-boiled cabbage, and four types of small savouries. Per the same account, the menu was drawn up specially with Luo Guorong, invited over from the Beijing Hotel, "revised several times, with the final version written out by Master Songru himself." This menu uses "oil-net purse chicken," corroborating this site's separately noted naming variance with "oil-net lantern chicken."
The 1981 Life-page entry gained a May 1990 home dinner: a neighbour hosting four guests, with Chen Songru drawing up the menu himself and cooking — crispy-rice squid, kung pao diced pork, mapo tofu, mushroom hearts, and hot-and-sour soup, plus three small cold dishes and a fermented-rice glutinous rice noodle salad. The same account lists shadow beef among his signature dishes, and leaves a rare outsider's-eye description: "Master Chen always had a smile on his face; he was quiet, not much of a talker" — sitting alongside the more familiar biographical image of a man always ready with a maxim.
The signature-dish list from the restaurant's founding years filled out: superior clear soup with bird's nest, plain-boiled cabbage, oil-net lantern chicken, braised duck breast with soy pulp, dry-braised shark fin, three-treasure abalone, home-style sea cucumber, kung pao prawns, and mixed soup with assorted delicacies.
Added a record of themed banquet series the restaurant developed: all-chicken, all-duck, all-fish, all-prawn and all-scallop banquets — each built entirely around one ingredient, not previously recorded on the site.
Xuyong preserved eggs are conventionally not steamed or boiled; he turned them into a paste for use in steamed ground pork, stir-fried scallop and shrimp, braised ox-tail soup, and preserved-egg duck, among other hot dishes and soups — a dish disciple Xiao Jianming called "something of an innovation of Master Chen's" (per an oral account in Sichuan Cuisine, issue 8, 2024).
Dry-braised fish card gained a note on regional adaptation: the Chengdu method's minced-meat component uses chopped preserved mustard greens with pickled chilli and minced lean pork; the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant substituted diced fatty pork and bamboo shoot with doubanjiang, to suit local taste. The German-edition Craft page has no dry-braised fish card (a pre-existing gap), so this item was not applied there.
Lineage page: added four 1960s-era apprentices — Cui Yufen, Yu Fengxian, Sun Mianjian and Zhang Guiyun (cross-referenced between "Recollections" and Baidu Baike), and noted the name variants Zhang Huaijun/Zhang Huaijun (different characters, same reading), without adjudicating which is correct.
Lineage page: added a fourth spelling variant, "Huang Shaoqing," for Huang Shaoqing (per Luo Kaijing's article), which also records that Liu Shao'an, a disciple of the same master, is the very person already recorded on this site as another teacher of Zheng Shaowu — a stronger thread of connection, though still not treated as proof of identity.
Life and Era, 1959: added opening-day detail — on the National Day opening, only two main dishes were served (braised duck breast with soy pulp, dry-braised fish head), per Reminiscences: A Short History of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant.
1959 exhibition: after the section on the mansion's history, added the restaurant's own two subsequent relocations — moving to Prince Gong's Mansion in the mid-1990s (1995 or 1996, both given), then to Xinjiekou in 2010, and its 2005 merger into the Quanjude Group.
News page · Video Channel Highlights: the third caveat rewritten from device-specific ("tested working on iOS / HarmonyOS's native WeChat reports a low version") to a general-purpose form: if you see "Your WeChat version is too low," please update to the latest WeChat or open this page in your phone's browser instead. Eight languages.
News page · Video Channel Highlights: clip 39 replaced — the 21 July 2026 clip on the same subject (Zhou Shengping's account of Prince Sihanouk's birthday banquet) had been deleted by its original author, who reposted it on 10 August 2026; swapped in the new posting. Video ID, publication date, cover, engagement counts and QR payload all updated; titles and copy in all eight languages unchanged, count still 39. Why the swap: the original entry had been deleted by its author and would have become a dead link — clicking the cover would fail to fetch a code, and clicking through would land on an empty page. This site only keeps clips that can actually be watched, and a broken link has to be swapped rather than left marked "expired."
Craft & Legacy · dry-braised fish: the German edition gained the full August-2026 passage — the motivation and method behind the adaptation (per Chen Tinglong's oral account), the two alternate names "oil-cube dry-braised fish" and "Daqian dry-braised fish," and the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant's regional adjustment from chopped preserved mustard greens with pickled chilli and minced pork to diced fatty pork and bamboo shoot with doubanjiang. Why it had been missed: the earlier batch's script searched the eight languages for dish cards by matching the Chinese name "干烧鱼," and the German card was titled Trockengebratener Fisch (Ganshao Yu) — no match, so the script recorded it as "no card in this language" and skipped it, when in fact the card had been there all along, just missing this content. The same cause had also led the site to believe the French edition lacked a "home-style sea cucumber" card; on recheck, that card also exists, so all eight languages are now complete. This kind of gap cannot be caught by the alignment tool, which compares content anchors and structural blocks, not whether a dish card's own body text is present — it can only be found by comparing body-text length language by language.
About This Site · Cookies and Visitor Statistics: the previous wording read "This site uses no third-party analytics, no tracking cookies, and does not record your IP address, device fingerprint, or browsing behaviour." The first two claims are true; the third — "does not record your IP" — does not hold: the site is hosted on Tencent Cloud object storage and CDN, whose standard access logs necessarily record client IP addresses, and it is exactly these logs that produce the "unique visitor count" and "regional distribution" figures shown in the console. Now reads: no third-party analytics code, no tracking cookies, no device fingerprinting, no cross-site tracking or user profiling; and separately discloses that the hosting provider retains standard access logs (including IP, access time and the address accessed), used only to see overall traffic volume, understand which pages are read most, and troubleshoot faults — never linked to any identity, and never shared externally. Why the change: a privacy statement is a promise to the reader, and describing it as cleaner than it actually is amounts to breaking that promise. Better to state it less flatteringly than to leave an unkeepable promise on the site. Eight languages.
News page · Life & Reference: added "My Master Chen Songru — Xiao Jianming's Interview" (WeChat, 2023), an interview by disciple Xiao Jianming on the thirtieth anniversary of his master's death, part of a "Sichuan Cuisine Oral History" series. Covers two pieces of advice Chen Songru gave when Xiao Jianming went to prepare the Sichuan Restaurant's Jiamusi branch in 1987 (on departure, "hold to the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant's traditional character"; before returning, "you should also learn from Northeastern cuisine — see which techniques and dishes can serve our purposes"); a 1992 photograph of master and disciple together at the opening of Chengdu's Jinshuiyuan restaurant; his parting words in 1993 when Xiao declined to succeed him as head chef of the Sichuan Restaurant — "Go, then; I respect your choice… just don't bring shame on the Sichuan Restaurant"; and details such as adjusting seasoning by season, patiently answering questions from a street stall in Zhongshan Park, and never accepting a cash gift, plus a July 1988 photograph of master and disciple together at the Beijing "Huadu Cup" culinary competition. Honestly notes three discrepancies: the piece's closing biographical note gives "1920–1993," "transferred to the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant in 1958" and "died February 1993," none of which match this site's dates (7 December 1921, 1959, and 16 January 1993, per the 1993 workplace eulogy) — each is noted individually, with no attempt at reconciliation. Positioned by the thirtieth-anniversary framing (i.e. 2023) but with no exact date found, so placed last within the 2023 group, before the 2024 entry. Eight languages.
News page · Life & Reference: the paragraph noting the three discrepancies in the Xiao Jianming interview's closing note (birth year 1920, transfer year 1958, death "February 1993") against the site's own dates was removed entirely, across eight languages. Why: this site's "honestly juxtapose both accounts" treatment is meant for cases where two accounts are each independently supported — not for a case where one side has already been disproven. The birth date of 7 December 1921, the 1959 move to Beijing, and the 16 January 1993 date of death are all backed by confirming documents (including the workplace-authored "The Life of Comrade Chen Songru," January 1993) and confirmed by the family; the article's 1920/1958/February 1993 are simply commonly circulated errors. Since this is not a genuine disagreement, displaying the incorrect version on the page would only give readers one more wrong account to remember. The rest of the entry and its links are unchanged.
Craft & Legacy · plain-boiled cabbage card: corrected a misplaced passage. The section added in August 2026 about "a step-level list of modifications" (dropping the bean-sprout bed, cutting into strips, dicing the meat, the home-style flavour core unchanged, etc.) actually describes how home-style sea cucumber was adapted from the traditional "bean-paste sea cucumber," not plain-boiled cabbage — it had been inserted into the wrong card during that August update. The passage has been removed. No content is lost: home-style sea cucumber's own recipe page already carries the same passage in full (including "dropping the bean-sprout bed — a matter of occasion, not a concession on flavour" and the comparison with Zhu De's instruction). The French edition was never affected by the insertion and needed no change.
Craft & Legacy · dry-braised fish card: the card's summary had grown to 363 characters (other cards on the same row run 18–27), breaking the grid layout. The motivation-and-method passage properly belongs on the recipe page, and the recipe page already had it; only the closing sentence about the regional ingredient adjustment was missing there, and has now been moved over verbatim (not retranslated, to avoid introducing unreviewed new text) into the recipe page's "From Chengdu Dry-Braised Fish to State-Banquet Dry-Braised Fish" section, restoring the card to a single-sentence summary. Eight languages.
Style note: the dish cards on the Craft page are grid summaries and must match the length of others on the same row; expanded content belongs on each dish's own recipe page. Both cards in this batch had made the same mistake, writing recipe-page content into the summary.

9 August 2026

A "structural silence" boundary added to the Q&A demo; three dishes' provenance corrected and expanded per Chen Tinglong's original account; a fourth home-page exhibition block added for 1991; a Video Channel Highlights section launched on the news page and grown from 5 clips to 35, with the viewing mechanism rebuilt twice — first to a tap-to-reveal QR popup, then, after discovering that a stored code inevitably goes stale, to live codes fetched from WeChat's own official page; a disciple's name corrected (Zhou Shengping) with a documented correction trail; his own oral account brought onto the Lineage and Singapore-exhibition pages, with a follow-up correction of an over-attribution; the viewing instructions rewritten from real-device tests; several new sources added to the news page; and three batches of fact-checking against the Skill review added biographical detail, corrected a disciple's name, and cut a misleading implication

Added a "structural silence" boundary to the Q&A demo — there are three topics he is not on record addressing in life: political allegiance, ranking his contemporaries, or airing grievances over unfair treatment. No biography, memoir or disciple's account gives his view on any of them. A pre-set Q&A library naturally tends toward giving every question a smooth answer, which is exactly the wrong instinct here — inventing an answer would mean speaking for someone who cannot speak for himself. The page header now states plainly that these three categories are not simulated, and the Q&A library gained a dedicated entry: a brief, in-character deflection ("what I went through is past, it's past; I won't rank my peers; I have nothing to say about political positions"), followed by an editor's note explicitly marked "not a simulated statement," explaining this is an honest disclosure rather than an evasive design choice. Synced across all eight languages.
Fixed a mis-routed match in the Q&A logic — the keywords "politics" and "allegiance" had been attached to the "kitchen factions" entry, so a political question would be answered with his even-handed approach to workplace politics, making it look as though he had a view on political allegiance after all. Removed those keywords and placed the new entry ahead of it (matching takes the entry with the most keyword hits, ties broken by order). Simulated across all eight languages: political and grievance questions now route to the new entry, kitchen-faction questions still route to the original one.
Corrected: oil-net lantern chicken uses two whole chickens, not one chicken split in half — the recipe page had described the technique as "half in five-spice white brine, half in red chilli brine," a misreading of the source material. Chen Tinglong's original text in A Brief Account of State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine reads "one chicken goes into a special five-spice white brine, the other into a special red chilli brine" — and the standard recipe on the same page (from The Verified Techniques of Sichuan Cuisine Masters) already correctly reads "two tender young chickens as the main ingredient… one whole chicken is boned and prepared white-style inside a caul, the other is coated inside and out with red chilli oil… after wrapping, both chickens are rolled in dry bean starch" — meaning the recipe itself was correct and only the technique summary was wrong, a genuine internal contradiction on the same page. Corrected in 32 places across eight languages. This also explains Chen Songru's own remark about "remaking a pair": what was remade was one complete dish, not half of one.
Added: the origin of oil-net lantern chicken — the 1959 exhibition's "Where This Dish Came From" section now explains its development from the older Sichuan dish "oil-net purse chicken": two pieces of chicken breast sandwiching preserved-vegetable shredded meat, wrapped in caul fat and deep-fried, whose "cut and plated form is not very attractive, and the flavour is simply salty-savoury"; adapted into lantern chicken, using young Beijing chickens, with two whole birds split between white and chilli brines, boned and knife-scored into lantern shapes, yielding one dish in two colours and two flavours. The site had previously treated these as two names for the same dish; this confirms they are, in fact, two dishes in a line of descent.
Added: the fixed menu at the Beekeeping Passage senior-cadre club — a new passage in the 1959 exhibition's unit five records that from 1959 to 1966, for eight consecutive years, on May Day and National Day, Mayor Peng Zhen hosted a banquet at the central senior-cadre club on Beekeeping Passage for the leaders who had reviewed the parade from Tiananmen, twelve tables each time, with Zhou Enlai attending every occasion. The menu was fixed; the kitchen raised the idea of changing it several times and was told, "you may add dishes, but you may not change them." This grounds the site's recurring theme — "the authentic version must not be lost" — in one specific, hard constraint, and it is worth noting which side proposed the change: it was the kitchen that wanted to, not the guests. Synced across eight languages; evidence labelled as family material, cross-corroborated, pending independent verification.
Home-style sea cucumber: added the process of its adaptation from bean-paste sea cucumber — previously the site said only "adapted from the traditional dish bean-paste sea cucumber." Per Chen Tinglong's original text, the comparison is now given in full: the Chengdu version sits on a bean-sprout bed, with the sea cucumber cut into axe-wheel slices and thickened with doubanjiang sauce; the state-banquet version drops the bean-sprout bed, uses sea cucumber cut into four or five strips at 80% rehydration, dices the fatty-and-lean meat into roughly half-centimetre cubes, and braises for 30–40 minutes to a glossy, unthickened finish. This also clarifies a distinction the site had not previously made explicit: dropping the bean sprouts was a matter of occasion — a bean-sprout bed looked unrefined on a banquet table — not the kind of change-to-the-core-flavour that Zhu De's instruction to omit chilli represented. What changed: the bed, the cut, whether it is thickened, and the cooking time; what did not change: the main ingredient and the home-style flavour profile at its core.
Dry-braised fish: added the motivation behind the adaptation and the alternate name "Daqian dry-braised fish" — the Chengdu version uses chopped preserved mustard greens with pickled chilli as the minced topping; without the dried chillies it becomes indistinguishable from preserved-vegetable fish. Chen Tinglong records the reason for the change not as the dish tasting bad but as "not distinctive enough, the flavour profile too faint — bringing it to a state banquet meant it had to be adapted." The revised method strains out the solids from fried doubanjiang, ginger, spring onion and garlic to make a thick red sauce, then braises the fish until the sauce reduces to a glossy finish; "this technique was quickly imitated in Beijing and spread, and became known by the names oil-cube dry-braised fish and Daqian dry-braised fish" — the "dry-braised oil-cube fish" recipe already on this page belongs to that lineage. Both dishes synced across eight languages, evidence labelled as family material, cross-corroborated, pending independent verification.
Added a promotional block for the 1991 exhibition to the home page — previously the home page carried promo blocks for only the 1959, 37-Pages and Singapore exhibitions; since the 1991 exhibition went live, it had never had a home-page entry point. Added as a fourth block, placed after Singapore (ordered by subject year: 1959 → circa 1980 → 1987 → 1991), reusing the same layout as the other three. The lede highlights the weight of the material: the tape sat in a cabinet for over thirty years, and at the 4:16 mark he speaks in his own voice — one of only two places in currently public material where his voice can be heard. Synced across all eight languages, each using its own 1991-page title and lede rather than a fresh translation.
Launched a new "Video Channel Highlights" section on the news page, initially with five public clips from Chen Tinglong's WeChat video channel (fifty-six years in the trade since 1969, the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant in 1973, what makes a dish "state-banquet Sichuan cuisine," and others), presented as cards with cover, publishing account, date and engagement counts, linking out to WeChat. Synced across eight languages. Three adjustments made to match this site's conventions: entries sorted by publication date (the source material's order was not chronological); the cover container set to a 3:4 ratio, since video-channel clips are shot in portrait (405×720) and a 16:9 frame would crop people out; and colours drawn from the site's own variables rather than the source platform's red gradient, to avoid two visual systems on one page. On rights: the content is published openly by two video-channel accounts, "Sichuan Cuisine Museum" and "Yang Fei Cooks Sichuan," with copyright resting with the original publishers; this site displays covers and titles under fair use and links back to the source, without transcribing, editing or republishing, and applies no watermark to the covers (a watermark would imply ownership). Engagement counts are noted as a snapshot taken at the time of cataloguing.
While building this section, tag-pairing self-checks turned up two pre-existing, previously unnoticed HTML structural defects that browsers had been silently correcting: the navigation container <div class="nav-wrap"> was missing a closing tag on all 125 site pages, and nine German pages plus one Spanish page had a duplicated opening <span> tag in the footer. Both fixed, in the position the browser had already been auto-closing them, with no change to the rendered output. All 254 site pages now balance perfectly across div/span/section/p/a/ul/li.
Moved the "Video Channel Highlights" section from the end of the news page to just before "Lineage & Disciples," next to "Original Clipping Scans." Synced across eight languages; removed a doubled border where the section's top border met the previous section's bottom border after the move.
Corrected the engagement-count display to match the video-channel interface exactly, and fixed a data error in the process — checking against screenshots of the actual video-channel UI found two problems: the interface in fact shows four figures (likes, shares, favourites and comments), one fewer than the site had listed; and "likes" and "favourites" are two different numbers in the source material, but the site had been showing the "favourites" figure under "likes" for all five entries (for example, the 10 April 2025 clip actually shows 18 likes and 24 favourites, but the site had shown the wrong number entirely). Now four icons with numbers, matching the video-channel interface one for one, each icon carrying a screen-reader-only text label, localised per language. On mobile, where cards are only 166px wide, the four figures wrap to two rows of two.
Aligned the rows within video-channel cards — since titles run to one or two lines depending on length, the publish date, engagement figures and "Watch on WeChat" button had been landing at different heights across cards in the same row. Switched to CSS subgrid, tying the card's five internal rows (cover / title / date / engagement / button) to the outer grid's row tracks, so cards in the same row share tracks and a longer title no longer throws off the rows beneath it. Older browsers without subgrid support degrade to "at least the buttons line up," with no broken layout. One snag along the way: subgrid inherits the outer grid's row gap, and that 18px gap (12px on mobile) leaked into the card's internal spacing — the gap between the date and the engagement row measured out at 49px instead of the intended 28px. Fixed by having the outer grid define only column gaps, giving vertical spacing between cards via margin instead, and moving this rule after the narrow-viewport media query, so the narrow-screen rule does not reintroduce the gap.
Added a note to the video-channel section explaining that clips will not autoplay — the links themselves work correctly (all five short links resolve with a 301 to WeChat's official preview page and open normally), but sound-on video is blocked from autoplaying without a tap, on both mobile browsers and inside WeChat; this is a platform rule an off-site link cannot override. The note now tells readers to tap play manually, so a silent video is not mistaken for a broken link. Synced across eight languages.
Reflowed the mobile engagement row back to a single line — it had wrapped to two rows of two, pushing the button below it lower. Reduced the font size, icon size and spacing so all four figures fit on one line (136px wide on a 375px screen, 109–120px on a 320px screen, both within the card's content area). Wrapping would have made card height depend on title length, conflicting with the requirement that rows line up across a whole row of cards — better to shrink than to wrap.
Re-verified row alignment on mobile — titles run to two through four lines on mobile (German the longest). Confirmed that subgrid still holds on mobile too: the date, engagement and "Watch on WeChat" rows land on the same lines across a row of cards regardless of title length, tested on Simplified Chinese and German at both 375px and 320px widths.
Removed the per-card "Watch on WeChat" button on mobile — testing confirmed that WeChat does not allow an off-site web page to jump directly into the video channel, so on mobile these buttons would mostly just show "This page cannot be opened right now" (server-side, everything checks out — all five links return identical results to WeChat's user agent and to ordinary browsers; the block is entirely on WeChat's client side). A button that will always fail serves no purpose, so on mobile it was replaced with a single note beneath the cards explaining why there is no button and where to watch instead — search WeChat's video-channel accounts "Sichuan Cuisine Museum" or "Yang Fei Cooks Sichuan" for all five clips. The desktop buttons were left as they were. Synced across eight languages.
Expanded the video-channel section from 5 clips to 12 — seven new entries added: a third-generation disciple's induction (5.9), Twenty-Four Flavours of Sichuan Cuisine season two, sweet-fragrant flavour · eight-treasure steamed pot (7.27), Chen Tinglong's discipleship ceremony (10.18), tomato-flavour · tomato snow chicken (10.19), influenced by a master-chef father (10.22), one-pan poached-double-crisp (10.23), and welcoming Master Chen home (11.15) — all sorted by publication date. The section title was also updated: previously "Video Channel Highlights · Chen Tinglong," but the new induction clip's subject is a third-generation disciple, not Chen Tinglong himself, so keeping his name in the heading would have been a mislabel — changed to "Video Channel Highlights · Chen Tinglong and Songru Sichuan Cuisine." Two clips were left out: one turned out, on comparison, to be another share link for a clip already on the site (matching title, publishing account, timestamp and all four engagement figures, and the two cover images' MD5 hashes matched too) — the same footage is not catalogued twice; the other clip's source material carried no metadata at all and remains pending.
Standardised cover images to 540×720, filling the frame fully — the seven video-channel accounts' original covers came in five different ratios (405×720, 540×720, 456×608, a square 720×720 programme card, and a landscape 720×405 group photo). A straight 3:4 crop would have cut the caption text off the square programme card and the people at the edges of the group photo; leaving uncropped whitespace instead would have broken up the row of cards. Now processed by category before cataloguing: near-3:4 images are simply scaled; portrait images are cropped top and bottom (framed slightly high, since faces sit in the upper half and captions in the lower-middle); and images wider than 3:4 are centred with the surrounding space filled by a blurred, darkened enlargement of the same image. Processing script: tools/normalize_sph_covers.py; source images kept outside the repository.
Changed the viewing method to scan-a-code-by-tapping-the-cover, and removed the per-clip button — since WeChat does not allow an off-site page to jump directly into the video channel, the per-clip "Watch on WeChat" buttons mostly failed on mobile with "This page cannot be opened right now." Now tapping a cover opens WeChat's own scan-code page, watched by scanning with WeChat's "Scan" feature, the same on desktop and mobile; the twelve individual buttons were replaced by a single passage explaining how to scan, why it fails inside WeChat's own built-in browser, and the seven accounts' names (searchable directly inside WeChat by title and date).
Extended the asset-fingerprinting tool to cover a blind spot in images — tools/stamp_assets.py had previously only fingerprinted CSS/JS. Video-channel covers are regenerated by script from source images, so the filename stays the same while the content can change (a different crop or ratio triggers a rebuild); without fingerprinting, returning visitors would keep seeing the old image. Brought the images under assets/video-channels/ into the fingerprinting scope; other site images are append-only and were left out of scope, to avoid an unnecessary site-wide rebuild.
Moved the video-channel section to a single data source — titles, dates, accounts and the four engagement figures had each existed as eight separate copies inside the eight-language HTML; a manual update meant editing eight places, and missing one meant the eight languages silently disagreeing — a kind of error the alignment gate cannot catch, since each of the eight pages is individually valid, just inconsistent with each other. Centralised the data into tools/sph_videos.json, with the page generated by tools/build_sph_section.py; changing one number now syncs all eight languages, with each still using its own label (赞/Likes/좋아요). Verified that the generator reproduces the existing pages byte for byte (fingerprints aside), and ran a change/generate/revert round-trip that left the files with zero diff afterward. How the engagement figures get refreshed: someone has to open each link in a WeChat-logged-in browser and read off the four numbers by hand, then re-run the generator — an unauthenticated visit only returns an empty shell page with no metadata, so this step cannot be automated.
Switched to tap-cover-to-reveal-QR-code, scan with WeChat to watch — WeChat's in-app browser blocks off-site links from jumping into the video channel. Now tapping a cover pops up a QR code: on a phone, long-press it and choose "Recognise QR Code in Image"; on desktop, scan it with WeChat's "Scan" feature on a phone. One thing worth recording here: the QR code cannot simply encode an ordinary share URL, or scanning it with WeChat lands right back in the in-app browser and hits the same block — which is exactly how the first version got it wrong, and the boss found it did not work when testing on a phone. What WeChat actually recognises is the official deep link carrying a feedID, which only appears on the official preview page; these were fetched and catalogued individually for all twelve clips, and all twelve were decoded and cross-checked to match the official payload exactly. In browsers without JavaScript, the original link on each card still works, as progressive enhancement.
Redid the video attribution line to match the video channel's own layout — previously a single line, "2025.4.13 · Published by 'Sichuan Cuisine Museum.'" Now a vermilion square carrying the account's first character, plus the account name on the left, with a right-aligned date in ISO format. The square uses the account's first character rather than a copy of its profile picture, since the picture itself is copyrighted material; the word "Published" moved into a screen-reader-only label, taking up no visible space.
Corrected an earlier assumption — the site had previously said video-channel data "can only be fetched while logged in," which was wrong. curl failed only because the page is rendered by JavaScript; running it through a headless browser retrieves the title, date, account, all four engagement figures and the QR code, with no login required. The fetching tool (tools/grab_sph_payload.mjs) has been added to the repository, so refreshing engagement figures can now be done semi-automatically.
Allowed the long-press menu on the QR-code image specifically — the site has a blanket protection blocking the right-click and long-press context menu on every image, to prevent collection photographs from being downloaded. But on mobile, "long-press to recognise a QR code" fires that same event, so the QR popup's own code had been getting caught by the same block, making it impossible either to recognise or to save. Now made an exception for the video-channel popup's QR code, with protection unchanged for every other image — a QR code is not a collection item, and it is meant to be saved.
Expanded the video-channel section from 12 clips to 23 — eleven new entries: an interview with Master Yu Jianmin (28 November 2024, a disciple of Chen Songru), two interviews with Zhou Shengping from the Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Committee (one on Singapore, one on Prince Sihanouk's birthday banquet, both subjects already documented elsewhere on this site), Zheng Shaowu (a disciple of Chen Songru) discussing the origin of classic fish-fragrant shredded pork, Chen Tinglong on his father's influence, Chen Tinglong on the origin of mala-sizzled beef and tripe, and four on-site clips plus one blessing related to a discipleship ceremony. All resorted by publication date, with cover files renumbered accordingly to stay in sync with page order. A judgement call: the Zheng Shaowu clip was initially left out, since its title, body text and cover carried no visible link to Chen Songru, and including it would have asserted an unverifiable connection; after the boss pointed out that Zheng Shaowu is in fact Chen Songru's disciple, and that the clip itself mentions Chen Songru, it was added.
Moved the video-channel section ahead of "Original Clipping Scans" — the section order now reads: Life & Reference → Video Channel Highlights → Original Clipping Scans → Lineage & Disciples → History & Oral Accounts → Heritage & Donation Activities.
Changed the four "news links" sections to a two-column layout — Original Clipping Scans, Lineage & Disciples, History & Oral Accounts, and Heritage & Donation Activities are all short blocks ("title plus a one-line source note"); in a single column, most of the width sat empty and only a few entries fit on screen. Two columns fit a whole section on screen at once; the divider line moved to sit under each entry and the trailing-row edge case for two columns was handled; mobile reverts to a single column, since two columns on a narrow screen would squeeze the titles into one character per line.
Name correction: Zhou Shengping — the Lineage page had recorded this Chen Songru disciple's name with the wrong character, fourteen instances in all (four Simplified, four Traditional, four Japanese, two Korean). Corrected per his own oral-history clips, in which he appears and is named — the Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Committee's video-channel posts of 4 September 2025 (on Singapore) and 21 July 2026 (on Prince Sihanouk's birthday banquet), now catalogued in the news page's Video Channel Highlights section. A correction trail was kept: footnote 5 quotes Chen Songru's own memoir directly, so a name attached to a citation cannot simply be swapped silently — a note was added after that footnote in all eight languages, stating the original spelling, the basis for the change, and the date it was made. The English, French, German and Spanish transliterations were unaffected (the two Chinese characters are homophones), and the note says so explicitly, so readers of those languages do not think the pronunciation changed too.
Expanded the video-channel section from 23 clips to 33 — ten new entries: a 2020 well-wishing clip for the first Sichuan Cuisine Chef Championship, recorded by the Chengdu Tourism Association (the earliest clip now on the site); two on-site records of the same May 2022 discipleship ceremony; a May 2022 thank-you from Henan's "Wildfire Burn" restaurant (referring to Chen Tinglong as "chairman of the Chen Songru State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Expert Committee"); a 2023 "Rising Star" interview; a 2023 Ziyang discipleship ceremony for Chen Ming and Yi Dongxiao; a 2025 in-store consultation at Wang Laoma's Trotters; a discipleship-farewell clip from Ziyang's Zhonghe township in late 2025; a 2026 clip showing the cover of 160 Authentic Sichuan Dishes (compiled by Chen Songru, Jindun Press — the very edition already catalogued on this site); and a Chengdu travel diary shot on 16 May 2026, the same day as a discipleship ceremony. All resorted by date, with covers renumbered to match; the earliest clip now dates to September 2020, well before the previous earliest of November 2024.
Filled in missing cover images — this batch's source material came with metadata only; ten cover images were not present in the source folder. Recovered from the URLs given in the metadata and processed to the standard 540×720. Three clips whose connection to Chen Songru was not obvious at a glance — the book cover, the mutton-soup shop's discipleship scene, and the travel blogger's Chengdu diary — were checked individually: the book is indeed the one Chen Songru compiled; the discipleship-scene banner reads "Chen Ming and Yi Dongxiao pay tribute to state-banquet master Chen Tinglong as their teacher," with Chen Tinglong himself present; and the travel diary's backdrop banner reads "State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Mentor Chen Tinglong's Discipleship Ceremony," shot on the same date and at the same event as another entry already on the site. All three were included.
Removed the site's own stored QR codes and switched to fetching a fresh code live from WeChat's official page — the site had previously captured the content of the official video-channel QR codes and generated its own 33 static QR images for readers to scan. This approach was wrong and has been removed entirely. The reason: the official QR code carries a single-use credential — scanning the same video's code twice in a row yields different content (the first roughly 37 characters match, but the rest regenerates each time) — so a static image of it will inevitably go stale, and scanning it later produces no result. Now tapping a cover opens that video's official WeChat page directly, which generates its own QR code live, for the reader to scan with WeChat's "Scan" feature. A lesson worth recording: before removing them, this site had verified "all 33 QR codes decode to exactly what was captured," and every one passed — but that verified the wrong property. It confirmed that the image faithfully encoded the captured string, not that the string would still be valid later. Verifying the wrong thing gave false confidence rather than none. The broader lesson: any approach that bakes a third-party platform's temporary credential into a static page does not hold up.
Zhou Shengping's oral account brought onto the site — his two accounts for the Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Committee (4 September 2025, on Singapore; 21 July 2026, on Prince Sihanouk's birthday banquet) had previously only been catalogued as video entries on the news page, with none of their content used elsewhere. Two additions now made: the Lineage page gains his role at the Sichuan Restaurant — pastry and dim sum, previously entirely unrecorded on this site, and the snacks he goes on to list (boiled dumplings, red-oil wontons, dandan noodles, tangyuan, egg-yolk sponge cake, fresh-flower pastry) match exactly. The Singapore exhibition's "Team and Dishes" section gains a new "eyewitness account" panel, recording his recollection of the team's makeup, the dish list, and his remark about the menu: "we just prepared these few, nothing else — because he had set them, you couldn't go improvising." Evidentiary significance: the eight-person team had previously rested on Chen Songru's own memoir as its sole source; there is now an independent, first-hand corroboration, with the team structure (two restaurants, the Sichuan Restaurant and Xiangshan Hotel, the latter's two chefs handling accompaniments) matching the memoir; and his remark is currently the only record, from a subordinate's point of view, of how Chen Songru managed the kitchen on the ground. Honestly noted: the material is a transcript of an oral recording, with individual wording not verified against the speaker; he twice says "about a month," slightly at odds with the 21 days shown on the banner, treated as an approximate spoken figure, with the banner still taken as authoritative. Synced across eight languages.
Corrected an over-attribution — the previous entry read Zhou Shengping's remark, "because he had set them, you couldn't go improvising," as meaning "Chen Songru decided the menu," which overstates the case. Per the family, the 1987 Singapore menu was settled jointly by the event organiser and the Sichuan Restaurant's leadership, with Chen Songru responsible for the kitchen side of things. Zhou Shengping's original words were spoken from the position of someone at the stove, describing the fact that "the menu was already fixed" — a record of discipline at the executing level, not a statement about who held final say. Corrected across eight languages; this correction is consistent with the site's separately recorded "collective selection" mechanism for state-banquet Sichuan cuisine, and with Chen Tinglong's own remark that "state-banquet Sichuan cuisine is the achievement of a great many chefs and elders working together."
Rewrote the viewing instructions based on test results — testing on 9 August 2026, on both desktop and phone: a QR code carrying an ordinary share link would not open (scanning it with WeChat failed to reach the video channel), while a QR code carrying the official deep link, freshly generated, played correctly on both. This confirms that no off-site QR code can be made both permanent and functional, and that sending the reader to WeChat's own official page, which issues the code on the spot, is the only approach that works and does not go stale — the current design is correct and unchanged. But a gap in the instructions was found and fixed: they had said simply "scan it with your phone's WeChat," which does not work for a reader who is already on their phone, scanning their own screen. Now split into three cases: on desktop, scan the screen with your phone; in a mobile browser, long-press the code to save it to your photos, then choose it from the album inside WeChat's "Scan" feature; and inside WeChat's own built-in browser, it cannot be opened at all — use a mobile browser instead, or search the account. Also stated that the code carries a single-use credential and should be used right away once saved, and that if it has expired, simply going back and fetching a new one is fine — so a reader who hits a black screen knows what happened and what to do. Synced across eight languages.
Added a new clip from "Sichuan Cuisine Museology," 13 December 2023 — on Sichuan cuisine's arrival in Beijing, the Sichuan Restaurant, and Chen Songru becoming head chef in his thirties; currently the most directly on-topic clip in the collection, and also the highest-engagement of the 34 (244 likes / 461 shares / 353 favourites / 27 comments). Covers renumbered by publication date across the board.
The Singapore-page menu attribution, from Zhou Shengping's own account, corrected once more: from "settled jointly by the organiser and the Sichuan Restaurant's leadership" to naming three parties — the organiser, Singapore's China Restaurant, together with the leadership of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant and Beijing Xiangshan Hotel. The earlier wording had left out Xiangshan Hotel, which had in fact sent two chefs to handle accompaniments and so had a legitimate place in the decision. Synced across eight languages.
"The Style of State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine" (Chongqing Hu Xiaohua Sichuan Cuisine Culture Development Foundation, 14 April 2017) carries a dedicated section on "Chen Songru, Head of Sichuan Cuisine," the longest external article catalogued to date. Two facts not previously recorded on the site: after joining Chengdu's Taoletian restaurant in 1933, "years of overwork, with illness untreated for lack of money" left him with permanent leg disability; and at the 4 August 1959 tasting, Zhou Enlai's remark that "Sichuan cuisine must not lose its authenticity" and Zhu De's "if anyone has a complaint, send them to me." The article notes it is republished via "360 Library," not an original source, and contradicts itself internally on one date (the Sihanouk banquet given once as 1982 and once as 1983); both points noted honestly in the entry.
"The Sichuan Restaurant — a Restaurant Personally Sited and Named by Premier Zhou Enlai" (Beijing Xicheng District's official media centre "Beijing Xicheng," 23 July 2026), a district-level official source, gives a complete lineage chain: Chen Songru → Zheng Shaowu, Yu Jianmin → Fu Lisheng. The article dates Deng Xiaoping's remark "the taste of home is wonderful" to November 1983, and dates the North Korean chefs' visit to learn home-style sea cucumber to 1956, both differing from this site's existing dates of 1982 and 1962 respectively; entered as open discrepancies pending further evidence.
The Lineage page's pending Huang Shaoqing spelling thread gained a third source and a key link: the article records that when the restaurant was founded, the kitchen included "Huang Shaoqing (teacher of Luo Guorong, respectfully called Master Huang), whose disciple Chen Haiqing" — and Chen Haiqing is exactly the person who, per this site, transferred to Beijing alongside Chen Songru in 1958–59 and worked with him at the Sichuan Restaurant, matching a long-standing question mark the site had carried about "Chen Haiqing sharing a name with another disciple of the teacher Huang Shaoqing." Since this article is a "360 Library" reprint, it still is not treated as proof that the two Huang Shaoqing spellings are the same person — only as a further thread.
The "George H. W. Bush" discrepancy on the Life and About pages now has a specific possible cause: the article states that it was his son, Chen Tinglong, who received Bush and Whitlam. If true, the "Bush" item may be a case of father's and son's activities being conflated in retelling. Still treated as a lead, not a conclusion.
On the leg-disability sentence in the Life page's apprenticeship section, noted that this article's wording is nearly identical to the site's own existing text, judged to share the same origin rather than count as independent corroboration; also added the leg-disability sentence itself, previously missing from the Traditional Chinese, English and German editions, and restored a passage in the Spanish About page that had previously ended in an ellipsis.
Added "Flavour," 27 March 2026, "Sichuan Cuisine Documentary · Twenty-Four Flavours of Sichuan Cuisine, Episode 20: The Story of Tangerine Peel." Its connection to Chen Songru is through flavour theory: his own late-life handwritten manuscript, The History and Characteristics of Sichuan Cuisine, systematically lays out eleven hot-dish and twelve cold-dish flavour profiles — the highest-grade first-hand document behind this site's flavour-profile framework — and this documentary is a present-day systematic treatment of the same subject. All covers renumbered by publication date.
The 1959 exhibition's founding section gained two items: the Party secretary's name also appears written as "Yan Hongyan," a variant spelling of the same person; and the criterion for selecting staff for the 1959 transfer was being "both politically reliable and professionally skilled" — a reminder that the 1959 selection was not only about culinary talent.
The Craft page's numbers section gained the process behind them: the "over three thousand dishes" figure was not settled all at once but arrived at by winnowing — contributions of signature and essential dishes from many hands totalled over three thousand, refined through discussion and selection to over two thousand, then further adapted, standardised and improved down to the four or five hundred dishes fit for a state banquet. State-banquet Sichuan cuisine is the product of successive rounds of selection, not a list drawn up by any one person.
The Life page's "three visits to Zhongnanhai" entry gained three items: Mao Zedong "liked stir-fried chilli, and often had chilli stir-fried with bitter melon and a splash of oil at every meal"; in 1962 in Shanghai, Zhou Enlai remarked that "plain-boiled cabbage is still best from the Sichuan Restaurant," after which the Shanghai Jinjiang Hotel, the Overseas Chinese Mansion and the International Hotel each sent staff to Beijing to learn the technique; and an alternate year, 1963, for Choe Yong-gon's visit, alongside this site's existing 1962.
The Life page's 1982 Sihanouk entry gained a fragment of dialogue: Sihanouk saying "today's food was excellent, I ate until my stomach was round," and Deng Xiaoping, "the taste of home is wonderful, it was a real pleasure to eat" — with a photograph of them together with the kitchen staff; the wording differs from the "bean flower" remark already recorded on this site, likely a different retelling of the same banquet, and both are honestly juxtaposed.
Lineage & Disciples gained "State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Mentor Chen Tinglong Welcomes New Disciples Again" (Sichuan Food Culture Network / Sohu, 2023): a 7 November 2023 discipleship ceremony in Chengdu's Xindu district, at which Chen Tinglong accepted Feng Jun as a disciple. Only the fact and name of the discipleship are catalogued; the trade press's laudatory language is not taken as a technical assessment.
History & Oral Accounts gained "In Remembrance of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook" (SC Creative Weekly, 2023) — the only source catalogued so far built entirely around an event for one of Chen Songru's own books. Three items new to the site: the book was commissioned in the 1980s by Sichuan Science and Technology Press; he compiled it from over four hundred dishes he had recorded over the years since the 1970s; and the first edition ran to just over nine thousand copies, of which he personally received fifty, the rest distributed by the restaurant to other organisations rather than sold to the public. Former Chengdu Catering Company deputy manager and head chef of New York's Rong Le Yuan, Yang Xiaocheng, displayed at the event a copy Chen Songru had personally signed and given him in March 1990.
History & Oral Accounts also gained "Beijing's Most Authentic, Oldest Sichuan Restaurant — the History of the Sichuan Restaurant" (Blue-and-White Porcelain Plate, 2021), which states its main source as Chen Songru's own 1988 memoir — already catalogued on this site as Reminiscences of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant — so it is not treated as an independent source.
Heritage & Donation Activities gained "Press Conference of the State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Songru Brand Committee" (Ziyang Quansousuo, 2022): on 7 July 2022, the Sichuan Provincial Food Culture Research Society's "State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Songru Culture and Technique Committee" was founded, with Chen Tinglong as founder and chairman; the report also states that Chen Songru's state-banquet Sichuan cuisine culture and technique had been listed on the intangible-heritage inventory of Ziyang's Yanjiang district. The entry notes specifically that this body is not the same as the separately recorded "Chen Songru Expert Committee" (founded 28 April 2022).
Five sources added in one pass: Guaimao Jingxuan's "Five Masters at the Pinnacle of Sichuan Cuisine" (8 July 2026), Zhongzi Weishenme Yao Lüxing's "Twenty-Four Flavours of Sichuan Cuisine · Tangerine-Peel Flavour" (14 June 2026), Sichuan Cuisine Museum's "Master Chef Lin Lixian: Working as a Waiter at Duoyi Canteen" (30 July 2025), Youzai Xianguang's "Xirongxian Hutong: from the Yugong Mansion to the Sichuan Restaurant" (20 May 2025), and Dai Zhe Zeren Qu Shangban — Deng Hong's "The Sichuan Cuisine Master Chefs' Fellowship and the Launch of Contemporary Records of Sichuan Cuisine Master Chefs" (11 October 2024). The video-channel account count rose to 31.
Two of these connect directly to the site's own material: the Lin Lixian clip discusses the Duoyi canteen, one of the places Chen Songru worked as a chef in the 1930s–50s; and the Yugong Mansion in the Xirongxian Hutong clip is the same late-Qing mansion compound Zhou Enlai selected in 1959, where the Sichuan Restaurant was housed.
Removed Guaimao Jingxuan's "Five Masters at the Pinnacle of Sichuan Cuisine" (8 July 2026) — the boss did not approve of its content. Covers renumbered accordingly, and the account listed in the description text removed; the video-channel account count returned to 30.
A 2-minute-3-second news clip from Bashu Ronmei / Youku Zixun, filmed in the conference hall of the Sichuan Provincial Institute of Socialism in Chengdu. On screen: the founding and plaque ceremony of the Sichuan Cuisine Culture Research Institute; a keynote address by Yin Huaguo, chairman of the Sichuan Provincial Food Culture Research Society; founding chairman Zhu Bingxuan receiving the title "Outstanding Figure in Sichuan Food Culture"; and expert-advisor honorary certificates presented on site. The Sichuan Provincial Food Culture Research Society is the parent body of the "State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Songru Culture and Technique Committee," so it was catalogued in this section.
Catalogued as a text-and-image entry linking to the original Youku clip, rather than embedding this branded third-party news clip on the site — consistent with the video-channel section's stated policy that "copyright rests with the original publishers; no transcription, editing or republishing." The Youku page carries no publication date; based on the "thirtieth anniversary" mentioned, it is estimated at roughly 2024–2025, with the exact date marked pending; neither Chen Songru nor Chen Tinglong appears on screen, and the entry notes it is included only as background context.
The previous entry's date, marked "year pending," is now settled — the boss pointed out the clip carries on-screen captions; on review, the caption reads "Sichuan Cuisine Culture Research Institute, afternoon of 29 April 2024." Updated to the confirmed date, and noted that this is just six days after Chen Tinglong's manuscript-donation event in Chengdu on 23 April 2024. Both languages updated.
Added "Xie Weide" to the Lineage page's colleague list — a chef at the Sichuan Restaurant around 1982, known only from a single line in Zhou Shengping's transcribed oral account. That transcript is a machine transcription not verified against the speaker, so a homophone spelling error cannot be ruled out; catalogued, like Jiang Huichao, at the name-only level, with no judgement made about identity.
The Lineage page's Chen Tinglong entry gained a fuller biography: born August 1948 in Ziyang, graduated from Chengdu's No. 5 Middle School; joined the Chengdu Catering Company in 1969, starting at the Yankou Bamboo Grove restaurant; transferred in 1972 into the company's training programme (later renamed Rong Le Yuan), studying under his father; posted to the Chinese embassy in Switzerland from 1980 for nearly seven years, hosting over 200 formal banquets and 300 buffet receptions; and in 1990 was engaged by Stuttgart's Chinagarten restaurant in Germany, converting it from Cantonese to Sichuan cuisine. Previously the site recorded only a general "a decade in Europe."
Added "Yang Xiaocheng and Wang Kaifa" to the Lineage page, noted as contemporaries rather than disciples of Chen Songru: Yang Xiaocheng knew Chen Songru from his teens and displayed a copy of the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook Chen Songru signed and gave him in March 1990; Wang Kaifa's wife worked front-of-house at the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant from 1965, and he himself visited to observe and learn in 1967.
The Life page's 1947 entry gained a previously blank piece of political biography: on the eve of liberation, alongside Zhang Deshan and Chen Banglin, he helped lead a labour movement among Chengdu's chefs, serving as a workers' representative in disputes with employers; after liberation he served as deputy chair of the trade union, and the government sponsored his education up through junior-secondary level as a result. Previously the site recorded only the vague phrase "politically progressive."
Name correction: this person's correct name is Xie Huaide, born 1947, a senior Chengdu Sichuan-cuisine technician who worked at the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant mainly in the mid-1980s, took part in state-level receptions, and later returned to develop his career in Chengdu. The name is prone to garbling in oral and handwritten transmission, commonly appearing as Xie Weide, Xie Weide or Xie Dewei; this site had previously followed a machine transcription reading "Xie Weide."
More important is a second correction: the site's previous version had placed this name within the account of the 1982 Sihanouk banquet — without explicitly claiming he took part, but the placement itself implied it. Now stated explicitly: the head chef for that banquet was Chen Songru, and no existing material confirms Xie Huaide's direct involvement. Cataloguing a name is itself a kind of claim, depending on where it is placed — that link had to be explicitly cut.
The Life page's 1987 entry gained a third account: the January 1993 workplace eulogy says "six disciples," which is not a contradiction of the memoir's "eight" so much as a different way of counting — two of the eight were from Xiangshan Hotel and not his own disciples; Zhou Shengping's eyewitness account independently corroborates this structure, moving the point from inference to confirmation.
The Life page's 1982 entry gained a comparison between an eyewitness's memory and the physical menu: Zhou Shengping recalls being assigned mala phoenix-tail and fish-fragrant duck; the former matches Chen Songru's handwritten menu word for word — the first time this site has direct corroboration of "participant's memory × physical archive"; the latter does not appear on the menu, judged to be a memory crossing between the dish names "fish-fragrant prawns" and "braised duck breast with soy pulp," noted as a judgement based on the menu rather than a correction from him personally.
The Life page's 1984 New Year's reception entry gained the dishes served that day: clear-soup straw-mushroom tofu-flower (Deng Xiaoping remarking, "so we do get tofu flower today"), fish-fragrant oil-cai stem, husband-and-wife lung slices, mock-flavour shredded chicken, and Sichuan pickles. Also noted a discrepancy: a 2017 reprint dates this occasion to "New Year's Eve 1983, with twenty-two leaders," considerably different from this site's own confirmed record — based on the physical banquet order form — of "1 January 1984, two tables, 22 people"; both are noted, with the order form taken as authoritative.
The Lineage page's Chen Tinglong entry gained his own definition of "state-banquet Sichuan cuisine" and his "three low, one high" principle (low salt, low sugar, low fat, high protein), explicitly noted as Chen Tinglong's own professional formulation, not attributable back to Chen Songru — who died in 1993 and left no such statement in his manuscripts or memoirs. Placed within Chen Tinglong's own entry specifically so the attribution cannot be misread.
The About page's discrepancies section gained two names given for the 1987 Singapore event: Chen Tinglong's material calls it the "State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Showcase," while the on-site banner and contemporary Singapore newspaper advertisements call it "The Taste of Sichuan: State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Highlights" — this site follows the physical evidence.
Digital Archive record BK-002, The Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook, gained detail on its production: commissioned in the 1980s by Sichuan Science and Technology Press; he compiled over four hundred dishes recorded since the 1970s and added the restaurant's own specialities; the first edition ran to just over nine thousand copies, of which he personally received fifty, with the rest distributed by the restaurant to other organisations rather than sold — hence its rarity today.
The Committee page gained a clarifying passage: the Sichuan Historical Society's Sichuan Cuisine Oral History Committee (founded 17 November 2022, chaired by Chen Tinglong, with Li Zuomin — the same person who compiled the upper volume of The Verified Techniques of Sichuan Cuisine Masters — as vice-chair and secretary-general) has completed over a hundred interviews and more than 500,000 words of transcripts for its "Journeys Through Sichuan Cuisine" oral-history project; this site's two Zhou Shengping clips were published by that committee. States explicitly that it is a separate body from both the Chen Songru Expert Committee and the State-Banquet Sichuan Cuisine Songru Culture and Technique Committee.

8 August 2026

The 1991 exhibition goes live in seven more languages and is cross-linked across the site; new holding PH-034 and a holdings band; fixes from the Codex eight-language review; the Beidaihe photograph re-dated; the Taiwanese guest’s toast finalised; three batches of fixes from the three-model review panel, covering language and object-level cataloguing of the film; the Singapore prelude switched to full NewspaperSG pages; clippings replaced with high-resolution scans; five more newspaper pages added to the Singapore timeline and eight catalogued in the archive; the run restated as 21 days; two exhibitions renamed and their titles switched to numerals; the Sihanouk banquet order form published; a 9 September aftermath entry added; two curatorial positions made explicit; and English editions of the changelog and teaching resources

Japanese edition — profile1991-ja.html is live. All 154 text blocks translated one by one; units, footnotes and time-code jumps correspond exactly to the Chinese master. Header, footer and other shell elements reuse the existing translations from the same-language 1959 page rather than being translated again. The subtitle track remains Chinese, labelled as such.
Korean edition — profile1991-ko.html is live, translated block by block, with units and footnotes matching the Chinese master.
All seven translations complete — the French, German, Spanish and Korean editions go live together; with the earlier traditional Chinese and Japanese, the 1991 exhibition now exists in eight editions. Each has all 154 text blocks translated individually, with unit counts, footnote counts and time-code jumps matching the Chinese master; the alignment tool passes on all seven.
Language switcher and sister-exhibition buttons — each edition’s language menu now points to that page’s own editions; sister-exhibition buttons that previously fell back to English with a language note now point to the matching language.
Cross-linking — the central idea of the exhibition is left alone; what the film names is connected to what the site already holds: Xirongxian Hutong to the 1959 exhibition’s premises section; the two dishes the narration mentions to their own pages; the leaders it names to the Life and Era page; the 1991 cookbook to its catalogue card; the 1992 honour to the award photographs in the archive; and the 1987 Singapore trip to that exhibition. Synchronised across all eight editions.
Yang Jianmin’s career filled in — the note identifying this interviewee now records that he led the Sichuan Restaurant from 1991 and later rose to vice-president of the BTG group; the Lineage page already carries an independently sourced card for this, and the text now links to it.
Three translation problems caught by the gate — a deprecated Spanish rendering of caul fat; Chinese enumeration commas left in French, German and Spanish prose; and Chinese text left in footnote aria-labels, which a screen reader would read aloud in Chinese. All fixed, with the assembler hardened accordingly; the rebuild passes clean.
New photograph accessioned — a scan supplied by the family of a group photograph with Deng Xiaoping, Yang Shangkun and restaurant staff. Full image and thumbnail generated to the site’s standard watermark spec, the clean original filed in the unwatermarked backup library and registered with the watermarking tool. Added to the archive as PH-034, with the register row and JSON-LD synchronised across all eight editions. The people were identified by the family and neither date nor occasion is recorded; every edition says so in the notes.
Cited in the 1991 exhibition — the photograph now appears directly after the passage about the leaders’ dealings with the restaurant, with its accession number, in all eight editions.
Holdings band — eight cards added before the coda: the mansion courtyard, the group photograph (PH-034), the two dishes, the cookbook, the lineage, the Singapore exhibition and the 1992 award photographs (PH-004). Where an object image exists it is used as the card face, so a reader can see at a glance what this film reaches across the site. The source note was rewritten when the blue title card was dropped.
Fixes from the Codex eight-language review — a cross-model review of all eight editions turned up: stray button text (“copyright page”) left in the English and traditional Chinese prose when a pill link was removed; the French and Spanish note about the narration adding one character to the book’s title having lost the title itself; a Korean mistranslation turning the World Master Chefs Association into a society of fine liquor; a broken German sentence; the evidence label “unverified” rendered as “pending verification” in Japanese and Korean; and residual Chinese full stops in four editions. The French “le père Chen” was kept after review — it is the ordinary colloquial way of addressing an older man in French, and the editor’s note already explains the register.
The Beidaihe holiday photograph re-dated — the author of Songfeng Ruren questions dating this to 1959. The men wear summer vests; a seaside holiday during the hardship years of 1959–61 would have been out of keeping; and the first visit to Zhongnanhai came in the autumn, when that summer was already past. Working from the menus by which the biography dates the three visits, the most plausible sequence puts it after the third visit in August 1961 — a fourth stint teaching the Chairman’s cooks, and the ten days at Beidaihe the following summer, 1962. Unit 07 of the 1959 exhibition becomes a section about the dating itself: the original caption is reproduced as written and the year marked unverified. The four places that cite it — the exhibition, the home page, the archive and the story gallery — were rewritten to match, in all eight editions.
Arrow links in the 1959 exhibition turned into pills — six “→ see …” text links on the page became pill buttons, in all eight editions.
Singapore 1987: the Taiwanese guest’s toast, finalised — with the recording of the toast now transcribed, the passage was rewritten. The visitors were a delegation of Taiwan’s refrigeration and air-conditioning trade association, with chairman Qian as guest of honour; the host was the Kaili Company (name transliterated, spelling to be confirmed), represented by general manager Zhang and manager Liu. The speaker called it a meeting five years overdue; the state-banquet-grade Sichuan food was prepared by Chen Songru’s team; the delegation brought commemorative gifts from Taipei, and Kaili promised visits and access to materials for the rest of the itinerary. The earlier conjectural account of who invited whom is withdrawn. All eight editions.
Three-model review panel, first batch of fixes — Claude Opus 5, GPT 5.6 Sol and Gemini 3.1 Pro each reviewed the eight editions independently. Fixes: (1) a uniform nine-entry hreflang matrix across all eight editions, and the eight URLs added to the sitemap — five editions had copied their whole language map from the 1959 page while the master and English editions had none, so to a machine this page barely existed; (2) navigation entries labelled “1959” in five editions actually linked here, and no separate 1991 entry existed — both fixed; (3) the note that the quoted passage is this site’s translation added to the Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish editions, which had been carrying an undeclared translation under a first-hand-account label; (4) evidence labels invented ad hoc for this page in five editions folded back into the site-wide controlled vocabulary; (5) the disciple surname Yu written with the wrong character in nine places in the traditional Chinese edition, plus thirteen other conversion errors; (6) the year unit in the “kept for N years” line localised — French, German, Spanish and Korean pages had been rendering a Chinese character at runtime.
Review panel, language and cataloguing batch — the central quotation made word-for-word identical wherever it appears in the Japanese and Korean editions, with the Korean summary’s promissory form returned to the wish the man actually expressed; Korean transliteration brought into line with the National Institute of Korean Language; the negative force of the word for “uproar” restored in Spanish, and sentence case applied to Spanish navigation; the unit restored to the film’s running time in German, French and Spanish; narrow no-break spaces completed inside French quotation marks; and the English note about the extra character in the book title now sets the Chinese alongside so the difference can actually be seen. The film itself was given object-level cataloguing: reference AV-007, carrier and extent (VHS, 7 min 33 s, at 28:08–35:41 on the tape), a digitisation statement in the record line, VideoObject structured data in the head, and the original Chinese of the quotation set beside the translation in five editions. All eight editions.
Full front pages of 4 August 1987 published — the prelude entry previously showed only cropped clippings; it now carries the complete front pages of Lianhe Wanbao and Shin Min Daily News for that day, from NewspaperSG at the National Library Board, Singapore, with an outbound pill link. Copyright rests with the original publishers, so no watermark of ours is applied. The full pages show where the two articles actually sat on the front page and how much space they took. The family’s own clippings remain on the archive and news pages. Also fixed: the Japanese and Korean editions had confused Lianhe Wanbao with Lianhe Zaobao, which are different papers. All eight editions.
The two 1987 articles: clippings replaced with high-resolution scans, shown beside the full pages — the clipping images for both articles of 4 August 1987 were replaced with high-resolution scans supplied by the family (roughly double the resolution; the body text can now be read word by word), and updated everywhere they appear. The prelude entry showed all four images together for a time: the two full pages from NewspaperSG and the two family clippings, so a reader could both read the text and see where it sat. All eight editions.
Five more newspaper pages added to Singapore 1987 — a new entry for 5 August 1987 carries the tasting review “Authentic Sichuan: hot but not parching” by Au Fu-lai (Lianhe Wanbao, page 4), which notes such details as the lantern-shadow beef among the eight cold dishes and the Wuliangye served with the meal. Under the entry for the run itself, four pages from the period: Shin Min Daily News of 10 August (Home News 3), Lianhe Wanbao of 12 August (page 7, a full-page feature), Lianhe Zaobao of 22 August (Food World) and the Weekend Teahouse page of 22 August. All are NewspaperSG images with an outbound pill link; copyright rests with the original publishers and no watermark is applied. The family’s clippings are pointed to on the archive page. All eight editions.
Eight NewspaperSG pages catalogued among the clippings — the newspaper pages from the 1987 Singapore run are registered as NC-007 to NC-014: the two front pages of 4 August, the tasting review of 5 August, the full-page advertisement of 10 August, the full-page feature of 12 August, the two pages of 22 August, and the prize draw of 9 September. These are a different kind of thing from NC-001 to NC-006, which are copies of clippings held by the family, so the rights and source fields say what is actually true — copyright with the original publishers, shown here as fair dealing, digital images from NewspaperSG — rather than reusing the wording about copies held by this site.
The Weekend Teahouse page identified — checked against NewspaperSG: it is page 11 of Shin Min Daily News, 22 August 1987. The masthead was not visible on the scan, so only the section name had been recorded; the paper and the writer, Li Lishi, are now given.
The run restated as 21 days — the banner gives 8 August to 28 August 1987, which is 21 calendar days counting both ends. The text had said twenty; it now says 21 throughout. The exhibition title was left unchanged for the moment.
The Singapore exhibition renamed — since the dates on the banner make 21 calendar days, the exhibition title, the counts in the text, navigation entries, sister-exhibition buttons, page titles and structured data were all changed to 21 days, in all eight editions. The page address is unchanged.
The manuscript exhibition switched to a numeral — the title and every reference to it now read “37 Pages”, in all eight editions.
The 1982 Sihanouk banquet order form published — on the Craft and Dishes page, the retained copy of the restaurant’s banquet order form now appears in the banquet-menu section, before the cold and hot dishes: dated 5 November 1982 at the head, the organiser field reading “Director Deng Xiaoping”, eight tables and eighty covers, banquet at noon, the dishes written out one by one. The text had been citing this form as the evidence for the date; readers can now see it. All eight editions.
Exhibition titles switched to numerals — the Singapore exhibition is now written with a numeral, matching “37 Pages”, in all eight editions.
A “9 September 1987 · afterwards” entry added — twelve days after the run closed, Lianhe Wanbao carried the sequel on page 8: the grand prize the China Restaurant had put up was drawn by roulette. The page is side evidence of how the whole thing was run, and wound up, as a commercial promotion on the ground.
The nature of the 1991 film made explicit — it is an in-house model-worker film, the restaurant’s own Party branch filming its own staff, not outside reporting. What it dwells on — past seventy and still at the stove daily, turning down the car and the room — was filmed in 1991 as something to emulate, while this site lists “work placed above health” among the limits he never examined. The narrative was therefore not conferred after his death; it was built and broadcast by his own workplace while he was alive, and the film’s praise should be read with that in view.
The weight of the 5 August 1987 review noted — it is a review written after the meal, neither a memorial piece nor a press release: the first assessment in this site’s holdings written at the time, on the spot, by a working journalist.
Changelog now in English — 12 dated entries, 150 records and 337 text blocks translated one by one; until now an international reader opening this page found only Chinese. A general page assembler was built alongside it: Chinese master text plus a translation map plus the shell from the same language, with internal links redirected to that language and untranslated languages rendered in the menu as “pending” rather than left as dead links.
Teaching resources in traditional Chinese and English — the six-stop curator’s tour, the 85-minute lesson plan and the three student worksheets, all 108 text blocks translated.
Ruby readings in Japanese — 104 ruby annotations added across 13 Japanese pages at the first occurrence of each name: people, dishes and places (Chen Songru, oil-net lantern chicken, Xirongxian Hutong). Only the first occurrence is marked; later ones are left plain.
Compressed passages restored in the English changelog — the gate found content that had been quietly condensed: the list of pages in the five-language repair entry; the two former newspaper names (Nanyang Siang Pau and Sin Chew Jit Poh) in the correction entry; the specific name pairs in the navigation-wording entry; and the four watermark parameters (Noto Serif SC, #96505A, 55 per cent, tiled horizontally) — seven passages in all, each restored. Entry and date-group counts verified at 152/152 and 12/12.
A missing report added to the traditional Chinese committee page — the alignment tool found that committee-zh-tw.html carried one external report fewer than the Chinese master (the 2022 visit with the Junzizhu brand to Xibei); now added.
Work titles marked up with <cite> — 1,662 titles across the site now carry semantic markup: 1,049 in the Chinese, Japanese and Korean editions wrapping the 《…》 brackets, and 613 in the English, French, German and Spanish editions converted from <em>. All 142 distinct <em> contents in the four Latin-script languages were reviewed by hand to separate titles from genuine emphasis: the quotation about the heat not being right in four languages, and the romanisation gloss for 市 in English, remain <em>. The browser default italic on <cite> is switched off, since CJK fonts have no true italic and the synthesised slant looks wrong; Latin-script titles get italics back through a separate class.
Traditional Chinese revised to Taiwan standard — the traditional pages turned out to have been converted with the OpenCC s2t profile (Hong Kong and archaic variants) rather than the Taiwan one, leaving forms that are not Taiwan standard: 爲 (478), 裏 (199), 着 (135), 喫 (127), 麪 (120), 蔘 (87) and 覈 (69), now 為, 裡, 著, 吃, 麵, 參 and 核. Thirty-one over-conversions were corrected: 干 had been turned into 幹 throughout, so 乾燒魚 read 幹燒魚 and 乾豆粉 read 幹豆粉; 發送 had become 髮送; the name 劉精松 had become 劉精鬆; and the adverb 只 had become 隻. Around a hundred vocabulary items were changed to Taiwan usage (網路, 資訊, 影片, 伺服器, 搜尋, 資料庫). All 833 pairs of curly quotation marks were changed to the corner brackets Taiwan uses.
What was deliberately left alone in that revision — items the scanner flagged but which context showed to be correct were kept as they stood: 于建民 (a surname, not 於), 千里馬 and 公里 (a unit of distance, not 裡), 岳強新 (a surname), 黃子云 (a personal name), 若干, 出征, 上游, 泰斗, 伙食, 批准, 允祕 (a Qing prince) and 灶台. 數據 in its numerical sense is used in Taiwan too, so only genuinely mainland collocations were changed (數據庫 to 資料庫); 項目, which appears inside the proper name of the intangible-heritage register, and 點擊 are both current in Taiwan and were left.
Blank screen on mobile fixed — the changelog page showed nothing below the header on a phone. The scroll-reveal used a visibility ratio of 12 per cent, which an element taller than the viewport can never reach: once entries were merged by day, a single entry ran to over 7,000 pixels against an 812-pixel viewport, giving a maximum visible ratio of 11 per cent, so the element stayed at zero opacity for ever. Reveal is now triggered when the element enters the viewport, with no dependence on its height. Every block taller than the viewport was affected, not only the changelog.
Content fingerprints on static assets — the HTML carried no-cache headers but the stylesheet and scripts did not, so a change could leave the browser using the old copy, which is exactly what happened while fixing the blank screen above. All 1,071 CSS and JS references now carry a fingerprint derived from the contents of the file: unchanged files keep the same fingerprint and stay cached, changed files invalidate at once. A tool was added so this need not be tracked by hand.
The two books in the 37-pages exhibition now use pill buttons — The Sichuan Restaurant Cookbook and 160 Authentic Sichuan Dishes had a single expand button reading “view cover and copyright page”; they now have two separate pills, Cover and Copyright page, matching the Craft and Dishes page, and either one opens the image directly. Synchronised across all eight editions, with labels and captions taken from each language’s existing wording.
A hidden rights statement brought back into view — when the Craft and Dishes page moved to pill buttons, the statement that written permission for public digital distribution of the full scans has not been obtained from the publisher or the family was left inside a container set to display:none, so readers never saw it. Thirty-two such statements across the two pages have been moved out of that container and now appear with the book cards.
The mini-programme brought in line with the site — the WeChat mini-programme now follows the wording settled on 7–8 August: two exhibitions renamed (21 Days in Singapore, 37 Pages — 21 places in all); the Singapore event given its full name and banner dates; and the Beidaihe photograph turned into a dating enquiry, with the original caption reproduced and the year marked uncertain, the three arguments and the 1962 summer inference matching the site sentence for sentence.
A fourth exhibition added to the mini-programme: 1991, What Was on His Mind — the film High in Skill, Higher Still in Character plays inline, with six time-coded chapters that seek the player, and six footnotes. The web page carries eight; the mini-programme lacks two — the second source for “model worker” and the two accounts of his people’s-congress seat — because the statements they support have nowhere to attach in the mini-programme. Nothing was invented to fill the gap, and the difference is stated at the foot of the page.
Two full newspaper pages added to the mini-programme Singapore exhibition — the front pages of Lianhe Wanbao and Shin Min Daily News for 4 August 1987 now appear under the prelude entry; and the Taiwanese guest’s toast was replaced with the version transcribed from the recording: a delegation from Taiwan’s refrigeration and air-conditioning trade association, its chairman Qian, the Kaili company, and a meeting five years late.
A claim of uniqueness no longer held, and was corrected — with the 1991 film public, the statement that the passage in which he speaks into the microphone is the only recording of his voice is no longer true; it now reads one of two. Corrected on both the site and the mini-programme. Any statement of the form “the only” or “the first” has to be rechecked whenever new material arrives, or it quietly becomes false.
Fifty places where “twenty days” had been missed — when the run was restated as 21 days, only the Singapore exhibition itself was changed. The same wording survived on the archive, story, 37-pages, 1959 and 1991 pages — fifty places across eight languages — contradicting both the exhibition’s own title and the banner dates. Now corrected in each language. Two kinds were left deliberately: the committee page quotes the commemorative documentary’s subtitle verbatim, and changing a quotation would falsify it; the same applies to the changelog entries that describe the renaming itself.
An inconsistent Japanese exhibition name — the Japanese edition of the Singapore exhibition titles itself 獅城21日, but the 1959, 37-pages and 1991 pages linked to it as 獅子の街の二十日間, matching neither the name nor the number. Eight occurrences unified.
The Japanese and traditional Chinese versions of footnote 6 — the change from “the only recording of his voice” to “one of two” had reached the Chinese, English, French, German, Spanish and Korean editions but not the Japanese or traditional Chinese ones, which still read “the only”. Both now corrected, with the pointer to the 1991 film added.
Companion-exhibition links now give the full title — the buttons that carry a reader between the four exhibitions used short forms (37 Pages, 21 Days in Singapore); they now give the full title (37 Pages: The Sichuan Cuisine He Wrote by Hand; 21 Days in Singapore: The 1987 Footage), 78 places across eight languages, each language’s full title taken from its own page rather than translated afresh. Three cross-language errors were fixed at the same time: companion buttons on foreign-language pages that pointed at the Chinese page. The four exhibitions in the mini-programme were changed to full titles too.
A broken language switcher on the traditional Chinese 1991 page — the “简体中文” and “English” entries in its language menu both pointed back at the traditional page, so a reader could not switch away. The assembler had rewritten internal links to the same language and caught the language menu along with them. Fixed, and a check added to the terminology gate so the same fault cannot pass again.

7 August 2026

The 1991 exhibition goes live: source restored, the film fully transcribed, self-rendered subtitles, a six-chapter index, and several rounds of refinement

Broken IIIF manifest fixed — the IIIF Presentation 3.0 manifest advertised on the manuscript exhibition page was returning 404. The file itself was fine (41 pages, valid), but a wildcard rule in .gitignore *.json had kept it out of the repository, so it was never deployed. The ignore rule is fixed, and the manifest now also carries seeAlso pointing to the collection registry and the checksum list. The machine-readable entry point the site advertised now genuinely works.
Overstatement in the English edition corrected — the Chinese reads “one of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine”; the English opening screen had dropped the qualifier and read “Founder of…”, with several metadata fields saying “pioneer of” — seven places in all. All now read “One of the founders of state-banquet Sichuan cuisine”, matching the strength of the claim in Chinese.
English site name standardised — five different spellings were in use, one of them, “Bawei Songru”, a straightforward pinyin error for bǎi. Twenty-five English pages, including the sixteen recipe pages, now use Baiwei Songru consistently, matching the suggested citation form on the About page — which matters for library cataloguing and academic citation.
Evidence labels made legible — “biography paraphrase”, the label a reader most needs to notice, sat at 2.90:1 against the paper background, below the 4.5:1 required for small text. The one caution that most needed to be seen was the hardest to read. It now uses a deeper gold at 5.75:1, and small light-background text in table headers and captions was darkened to 6.26:1. Gold on dark backgrounds is unaffected.
Held and sought items separated in the archive table — the figure of 61 items included things known to exist but not yet obtained or licensed, which made the number unreliable. The four sought items (MS-002, CE-001, CE-003, CE-004) are now marked with a dashed rule, a legend above the table states plainly “57 held or licensed, 4 sought”, and the downloadable collection-registry.csv gains a holding-status column. Consistent across all eight editions.
Object-level rights statements added to two exhibitions — the manuscript and Singapore exhibitions carried only page-level meta tags, so a visitor zooming into the manuscript or playing the film saw no rights information at all. Each now has a section setting out ownership of the object, who did the digitisation, the rightsstatements.org standard statement and whether reuse is permitted. The Singapore exhibition further notes that the venue photographs are press copyright and that reuse must be arranged with the original rights holder.
Claims that outran the evidence corrected — the Singapore page had said in the site’s own voice that the whole city took notice; it now states the fact (the length of the run). The claim that local papers called him a national-treasure master is now explicitly attributed to the biography and family material, with a note that the site had not yet obtained the original press images.
Evidence restored in the story gallery — a photograph carries an accession number, ownership and evidence level in the archive table, but in the immersive gallery only a caption survived. Each of the fourteen images now carries a line giving number, ownership and evidence level, with the number linking back to its row in the table.
The name of one dish corrected in several languages — the English archive table read “Home-Style Braised Sea Cucumber”, which turned the minced pork into a cooking method and was simply wrong; the German had split the word for sea cucumber into shark plus sea cucumber, and once rendered it as sea urchin; French and Spanish were off as well. Corrected consistently in four languages across 49 files.
Structured data raised to object level — the archive page’s JSON-LD covered nine hand-picked items; it now covers all 61, each with a stable anchor, carrier, ownership, evidence level, holding status and rights statement, aligned to CIDOC-CRM classes (E38 image, E31 document, E22 object) so institutional systems can harvest it.
Accessibility and typography — skip-to-content links, <main> landmarks, aria labels that follow the page language, and language tags on inline Chinese characters were added site-wide. The archive table becomes cards on phones, where nine columns had meant horizontal dragging and no real reading. English, French, German and Spanish get their own Latin font stack, and straight ASCII quotes were replaced with typographic ones throughout.
Japanese: a primary source’s title had a character changed — the biography’s title appeared repeatedly with the wrong final character. Since the site offers three citation formats, a Japanese researcher copying them would have generated a reference to a work that does not exist. All corrected.
Japanese: a unit of measure meant something else — photographs were listed as 6×8 “cun”. In Chinese usage that means inches; the Japanese character of the same shape is about 3.03 cm, so a Japanese reader would have taken 15.2×20.3 cm for 18.2×24.2 cm, about twenty per cent out. Now given in centimetres with inches in brackets.
Japanese: false friends and simplified characters — one word meant head nurse or head teacher in Japanese where a military commander was meant; another meant a stage performance where a cooking demonstration was meant; a dozen more Chinese words and twelve classes of simplified character had been left standing in Japanese prose. All corrected. Brown spots on paper had been called rust marks, the term for metal; they are now given the conservation term, foxing.
Japanese: readings and first-use glosses added — there was not a single reading gloss on the site, so a Japanese reader could not pronounce any name in the lineage. Nineteen personal names, place names, institution names and dish names now carry readings at first use, with pinyin added for Chen Songru and Chen Tinglong — Japanese readers remember by sound, researchers search by pinyin. Four terms with the highest comprehension cost also gained a first-use gloss.
Korean: the subject’s own name split in two — the same man appeared under one spelling eight hundred times and another three hundred. The first spliced a Sino-Korean reading onto the Chinese pronunciation, which does not follow the National Institute of Korean Language’s rules and does not connect to existing Korean scholarship on Chinese names. Standardised site-wide, with derived names corrected to match.
Korean: an institution demoted to a generic noun — the Beijing Sichuan Restaurant was rendered as “a Sichuan eatery” in more than two hundred places, erasing what the institution was. Restored to the proper name throughout.
Korean: the lineage and committee names were never translated — some seventy names on two pages stood in simplified Chinese, leaving a Korean reader unable to read any of them. Each is now transliterated from the Chinese pronunciation with the characters retained alongside.
Korean: Sino-Korean words that read as something else — one word reads first as “ambassador” where “master” was meant, in over four hundred places; another as “chairman” where “venue” was meant; another as “fine liquor” where “master chef” was meant; another as “trouble taken” where “manuscript” was meant. All replaced with words a Korean reader will not misread. One factual mistranslation was also fixed: adding water to the Premier’s glass had become “mixing”, at odds with the Chinese, Japanese and English.
Korean: citation templates and the home page — the Chinese national standard GB/T 7714 requires citation in the language of the original, but the Korean edition had translated both author and title, so a copied citation would find nothing in a Chinese database. Restored, with the reason given. The Korean home page still carried superseded copy; labels and descriptions for the two new exhibitions were brought into line with the Chinese, English and Japanese, and six missing exhibition sections were added.
English: factual mistranslations — a Beijing municipal people’s congress delegate card of 10 December 1981 had become a “Sichuan Restaurant Delegate ID”, erasing what the credential was; a renaming during the Cultural Revolution had become a “wartime renaming”, a word the Chinese does not contain; and Choe Yong-gon, chairman of the standing committee of the DPRK’s Supreme People’s Assembly, had become “Vice Premier”. All three corrected.
English: newspaper identities — reports from Lianhe Wanbao in 1987 had been split back into two mastheads that had ceased publication in 1983; Shin Min Daily News appeared under two misspellings, and one article was credited to the wrong paper entirely. All now use each paper’s official English masthead.
English: cataloguing vocabulary — the materials column held object types (paper photo, paper manuscript); it now follows international practice with material and technique (gelatin silver print, pen and ink on paper, twelve classes in all). “Family-owned” in the rights column carried a commercial-property flavour and conflated custody, provenance and reproduction rights; it now reads “Collection of the chef’s family”. The corresponding Japanese and Korean fields were corrected to match.
English: a dish name that contradicted the site’s own text — the cabbage dish had been translated as “steamed”, while the site’s own craft page describes hot clear broth being ladled over it; and the literal “boiling water” of the name misses the point, which is the clarified stock. It now keeps the original name with a functional gloss.
And one contradiction inside the Chinese itself — the byline on the article of 4 August 1987 appeared one way on the news page and another in the archive and the exhibition. The archive table was taken as authoritative and every edition brought into line.
Newspaper attribution corrected — the French and Spanish editions credited the 1987 report to Nanyang Siang Pau. That paper and Sin Chew Jit Poh merged and ceased publication on 16 March 1983, so a report from 1987 cannot have appeared in either. All three editions now give Lianhe Wanbao.
The qualifier in “one of the founders” — three home-page descriptions had compressed “one of the founders” into “pioneer”, turning one contributor among several into a singular position, while the body text elsewhere acknowledged the parallel work of his contemporaries. The qualifier is restored.
Choe Yong-gon’s office — the French and Spanish had made him president of the DPRK. His office was chairman of the standing committee of the Supreme People’s Assembly; the full title is now given.
A German cataloguing note that misstated the rule — the Chinese says the lineage page is ordered by stroke count of the surname; the German said alphabetically. This is precisely the page where the site uses its ordering rule to demonstrate neutrality, so an error in the note is an error in the cataloguing metadata. Corrected.
German and Spanish dish names — a braised beef-head dish became “grilled ox forehead”; pickled chillies became “chillies in vinegar”, when they are in fact lacto-fermented in brine; and a word in one Spanish cold-platter name was not a Spanish word at all. All corrected.
The cabbage dish against the site’s own account of the method — the settled French rendering said “steamed”, while the method described on the same page is repeated ladling of boiling clear broth, with no steaming involved; the German was too vague. All three now keep the original name with an explanatory gloss.
A German book title turned into praise — a neutral title had become “masterpiece of Sichuan cuisine”, an evaluative phrase, and it recurred with every citation. Restored to a neutral rendering.
French typographic rules — French requires a no-break space inside guillemets and before semicolons, question marks, exclamation marks and colons; the site had not one. On narrow screens a guillemet would break away from its word and a colon would end up alone at the start of a line. Some 2,800 were inserted to the Imprimerie nationale’s rules.
German quotation marks — quotations opened with the German low mark and closed with a straight one, leaving them unclosed. All closed to Duden. Also fixed: umlauts written in the ue/ae fallback form, missing hyphens in compounds, and Chinese enumeration commas and semicolons left inside German sentences.
Terminology unified — the site name had two or three forms within each of three languages (Spanish had two even in page titles), a book title had three pinyin spellings, and “founding head chef” had two renderings in every language. All standardised, along with two spellings of the French adjective for Sichuan and a mix of Chinese and English forms of Beijing in German and Spanish.
Accessibility — alt text on portraits and seal images gave only the Chinese name, in 212 places across six editions, so a screen reader would read Chinese aloud to a non-Chinese reader. Replaced with descriptive text in each language.
Endangered ingredients in a present-day context — bird’s nest, shark fin and bear paw had been described as marking the grade of a state banquet, which turns a historical record into praise for status when set in a display context. All eight editions now historicise the wording as evidence of how banquet hierarchy was then understood, with a new note: the site records these names as the manuscript has them, for the study of twentieth-century banquet culture, and does not encourage obtaining, eating or recreating protected wildlife ingredients. It also points to a countervailing thread the site itself records — Chen Songru imitating shark fin with pig brain and bird’s nest with sweet-potato starch, so that ordinary diners could have the experience.
Chinese-only pages marked as such — the teaching resources page and this changelog existed only in Chinese and were simply dropped from the navigation of other editions, so international visitors had no way of knowing they existed. Entries marked “Chinese only” were added to the navigation of 98 pages.
1991: What He Had to Say — what had been a bare player page became an approach to the year itself: an archival opening screen (a huge 1991, scan lines and grain, a VCR time code that follows playback, and a count of years the script works out for itself), six chapter entries, a timeline running through 1991 with him at its centre, and a then-and-now close. The title went through one intermediate form before settling.
The site’s first subtitle track — generated from the transcript checked by the family, film.zh.vtt with 75 cues. The header states that speaker labels in square brackets were added by the editor and are not in the audio. This is the first track among the site’s 48 videos; accessibility, full-text search and citation by position start here.
Time codes converted — narration and interview passages were marked with positions on the original tape, from 28:14, but the film on the page starts at 0:00, so clicking took the reader nowhere useful. All converted to positions within the film and made clickable; the tape positions are kept as archival information.
Three corrections to the transcript (the family checked the audio) — “deeply attached to the restaurant”, not “to Sichuan cooking”; “everyone says I am one of Master Chen’s favoured disciples”; and “there are too few of them — at seventy he is still giving off light and heat”. The interviewee at 34:16 is confirmed as Yang Jianmin, the restaurant’s general manager, where the note had said the speaker was unidentified.
1959 · appendix · the premises — the plan of the restaurant’s three courtyards was replaced with the original hand-drawn drawing, background and frame removed; the previous one had been a generated SVG. The caption was corrected against what the drawing actually labels: three small banquet rooms flanking the third courtyard, and an à la carte dining room on the east side of the second, where the caption had wrongly said private rooms.
The coda unified across four exhibitions — each page had been ending with a different set of links. All now use one form: the CODA wordmark, the three sister exhibitions, and an invitation to take part in the research — 26 files in all. The coda’s job is to send the reader to the other three exhibitions; the content pages are already reachable from the navigation.
Links in exhibition prose did not look like links — same colour as the text, no underline. The cookbook had linked to its catalogue entry all along, with no way for a reader to know. Now dark red with a hairline underline across all four exhibitions, and the section on the 1989 book gained a “cover and copyright page” entry.
Two fixes in the video upload workflow — the bucket region was set to Beijing when it is in fact Guangzhou, so every upload died on an SSL disconnect; once fixed, a 53 MB file then hit a thirty-minute timeout. Region corrected, timeout raised to 120 minutes, 5 MB parts and ten threads. The full 1991 film is now online.
A link nested inside a button — the second line of the chapter index contained a link to the cookbook, while the whole line was itself a button. Nesting an interactive element inside a button is invalid, and on a phone tapping the line fired the inner link and jumped to the craft page instead of seeking the player. The link inside the button became plain text; the book is still reachable from the body text and the timeline on the same page. The rest of the site was checked and has no other instance.
Subtitle size — set to 56 per cent of video height, down from 68, which was too large. Subtitle position was also confirmed to use line:80% proportional placement, so showing or hiding the player controls no longer shifts it; the black box behind the text was cleared.
HTML cache headers — the HTML carried no Cache-Control at all, so browsers guessed a lifetime from Last-Modified, often several hours; a change would show as the old version on a phone, or need a forced reload. Deployment gained a step that re-uploads only the HTML with no-cache, must-revalidate so readers revalidate each time. Images, video and CSS are untouched and still cache long. The step is set not to block deployment: if it fails, at worst the headers were not applied, and the content itself is already up.
Subtitles — size set to 80 per cent of video height, and the bracketed speaker labels removed: they were added by the editor rather than spoken, and who is speaking in each passage is already stated in the body text. Cue count went from 75 to 72.
Chapter entries on phones — the play control had been dropping to the bottom of each row, small and stranded. Now a two-column layout with text left and button right, the button a 42-pixel circle that reads unmistakably as play.
Plan drawing updated — replaced with a newer hand-drawn original, background removed along with the left, right and top borders. The labels were corrected: the first courtyard held the snack counter, the main hall of the second courtyard was the à la carte dining room, as was its east side — where three earlier captions had variously said “walk-in à la carte dining room”, “walk-in dining room” and “private rooms”, all wrong.
A “life” link pointed to the wrong page — in the 1991 exhibition it went to the lineage page instead of the life page. Fixed in the Chinese and English editions.
The “cover and copyright page” link showed neither — it jumped to the catalogue card on the craft page, but the cover and copyright page are collapsed inside that card, so a reader arrived at a closed card. The craft page now expands the matching card and scrolls to it when it detects the #book-xxx anchor.
Plan drawing border — the previous version had cropped the left, right and top borders; the drawing’s full border is restored, the background still transparent. The image carries a version number so browsers do not serve the old one.
The premises appendix completed in seven languages — the history of the mansion (from a prince’s residence through a banker’s house and ministry offices to a state-banquet restaurant), the hand-drawn plan of the three courtyards and two footnotes marking unresolved points existed only in Chinese; all seven other editions now have them, their footnotes rising from 10 to 12 to match the master.
Handling of proper names — names of the former residences keep their characters in every edition, with transliteration and a gloss rather than a translation of the sense; alt text on the plan is translated in each language with no Chinese left standing.
Plan drawing display size — the room names on the red plaques were unreadable at 640 pixels wide. The drawing is a raster image, so the text cannot be enlarged on its own; display width went from 640 to 960, making the labels half again as large. Applied in all eight editions.
Plan drawing — display width returned to 640 pixels, leaving the drawing as it was.
Exhibition renamed — retitled across all eight editions: link text, page titles, og and DC metadata and JSON-LD in 36 files. The opening line had duplicated the new title and was rewritten to describe the tape going into a cupboard after filming and staying there for decades, with the number of years still worked out by script from the current date.
UNIT 02 — with the retitling, the phrase became free again and the unit reverted from “his own voice” to it.
Plan drawing — replaced with the version whose plaque labels are enlarged, in all eight editions, with size and cache version updated. Background removal and border retention follow the previous settings.
Unit numbering — after the full-narration section was dropped, numbering jumped from unit 02 to unit 04, leaving a hole. Renumbered 02, 03, 04, with anchors and in-page references brought into line.
Opening line — brought into line with the exhibition title. The number of years is still computed by script rather than hard-coded.
Title settled — the earlier title is restored in all eight editions. The opening line about the tape sitting in a cupboard stays as it is; it now works as an opening rather than as the title.
Traditional Chinese edition — profile1991-zh-tw.html is live, with body text, footnotes, chapter entries, timeline and closing all corresponding to the master. Internal links point to traditional-Chinese pages; where none exists yet, they fall back to the Chinese page rather than leaving a dead link.
The language switcher led to the wrong exhibition — the whole menu in the Chinese and English editions pointed at the Singapore exhibition, left over from copying a template, so switching language on this page took the reader to a different exhibition. Now pointing at this page’s own editions.
Plan drawing — replaced with the latest hand-drawn original in all eight editions, with size and cache version updated.
Page names made consistent — the exhibition called one page “life” when the navigation calls it “Life and Era”, and another “craft” when the navigation calls it “Craft and Dishes”, so a reader looking for them found nothing. All three editions now use the formal names from the navigation.
The honest-limits reference made clickable — the text cited the honest-limits section but the words were plain text with nowhere to go. Now linked to that section on the About page, in three editions.
A link to “contradiction five” landed in the wrong place — it pointed only at the top of the Wisdom page, leaving the reader to hunt; and the text wrote the heading differently from the site’s own form. An anchor was added to that heading in all eight editions and the text now links straight to it, with the wording made consistent.
Two link styles on one page — the visible link style covered only links inside p and li , while the timeline and chapter notes sit in span , so references like the one to the Wisdom page stayed the same colour as the text and gave no sign of being clickable. The style now applies to the whole unit, across all four exhibitions.
Subtitle segmentation — where a cue held two clauses separated by a comma, it is now two cues; all punctuation is dropped, with enumeration commas becoming spaces so the rhythm of a list survives. Cue count rose from 72 to 87, each one a single unit of speech. The header note records the treatment.
The black box behind subtitles — in Chrome and Edge the box is not painted by ::cue but is the background of the -webkit-media-text-track-display layer, which ::cue cannot override. That layer’s background is now cleared separately, in three editions.
Subtitle size — reduced from 80 per cent of video height to 64.
Subtitle size — kept at 80 per cent of video height; the previous change to 64 is withdrawn.
Subtitles on phones — the size is relative to video height, and on a phone the video is only about 257 pixels tall, so 80 per cent came out around 10 pixels, too small to read. Below 640 pixels it is raised to 100 per cent, about 13 pixels; on desktop it stays at 80.
The black box behind subtitles, solved — it could not be cleared on desktop because subtitle styling in Chrome and Edge is governed by browser and operating-system caption preferences, which outrank page CSS: whatever ::cue says can be overridden. The browser no longer renders them: the track is hidden and the page draws the text over the video itself, so size, position and shadow are fully under control.
Deployment: cache headers applied to only half the files — the step that applies no-cache to HTML had been re-uploading all two hundred-odd files each time and was measured hitting a 300-second timeout, which meant the later files never received the header at all; because the step is set not to block deployment, the problem was easy to miss. It now re-uploads only the HTML changed in that run, usually a handful of files.

6 August 2026

Watermarks made uniform; claim-level footnotes go live site-wide; navigation and language switcher fixed on the recipe pages

The watermark was standardised across 22 images in the certificates and clippings folders (44 files including thumbnails) to one specification — Noto Serif SC, #96505A, 55 per cent opacity, tiled horizontally — and one image carrying two overlaid watermarks was fixed. The manuscript and book images were left for later, having no clean originals to work from.
Added: claim-level footnotes — about 97 notes across 19 pages, each factual assertion traceable by click to its source (memoir, oral-history manuscript, biography chapter, independent source), colour-coded by evidence level. The teaching page, the news page and this changelog were judged not to need them, being teaching material about the site, a list of links that already carry their sources, and the site’s own version record.
The sixteen recipe pages were brought onto the site’s current grouped navigation, gaining entries for the 1959, manuscript and Singapore exhibitions, and given a language switcher, which they had entirely lacked.
A site-wide Codex review found that on all 112 non-Chinese recipe pages the language menu pointed at the home page in that language rather than at the dish’s own translation, and that the grouped navigation lacked its styles so the menus unfolded out of place — all fixed, along with a missing current-language highlight on the home page and a wrong label on the language button of two traditional-Chinese exhibition pages.

5 August 2026

The manuscript exhibition adopts a static IIIF approach — 41 scans in all (the 37 manuscript pages, the cover and three additional drafts) with a manifest conforming to IIIF Presentation API 3.0 (manifest.json), and the OpenSeadragon deep-zoom viewer extended to every image and certificate gallery on the site, across 224 pages.
Added: A drag-and-zoom minimap on the timeline (Life and Era page) and hover labels identifying people in photographs (the group of eight at Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage, in the 1959 exhibition, in eight languages).
Corrections: MS-005 and MS-006 were transposed in the archive listing, and the entry for MS-006, the complete manuscript, was missing altogether from all seven non-Chinese editions. Both fixed.
Added: A collection registry（collection-registry.csv), exporting structured data for all 61 catalogued items so researchers can check them in bulk. Building it turned up 40 image captions across 12 files where an unescaped quotation mark had truncated the HTML attribute; those were fixed too.
Added: A checksum list（fixity-manifest.csv) — SHA-256 checksums for all 220 original image and video files, so a researcher can verify that a download is intact and unaltered. The About page gained a note on format choices and migration principles.
Added: A teaching resources page (education.html) — a six-stop curator’s tour, a lesson plan and three student worksheets for museum-studies and history undergraduates, using this site’s own curatorial decisions as the cases.
Correction: in the 1959 exhibition, one unit showed the Du Fu’s Thatched Cottage group photograph under a caption describing the farewell gathering. Replaced throughout with PH-008, the farewell gathering at Shengdeng Temple in all eight editions. The Du Fu photograph, its hover labels and the associated call for identifications came off that page, and the third stop of the curator’s tour switched to a “sought” entry in the archive (CE-004).

4 August 2026

Fixed a mobile navigation menu that was clipped on some devices, hiding the Community link.
The Singapore exhibition gained a note on the historical background of the Taiwanese guest’s toast — a glimpse of business contact across the strait before family visits were permitted — in seven languages.
The About page gained a note on long-term preservation and web archiving (Internet Archive snapshots). Every point at which the site asks for help — corrections, unidentified people, donations of material — now routes to info@chensongru.com, an address the site actually receives, in all eight editions.

3 August 2026

Two exhibitions go live in full, all eight editions completed the same day

Two new online exhibitions: 37 Pages: The History of Sichuan Cuisine in His Own Hand (the digitised manuscript) and 21 Days in Singapore: The 1987 Footage (route map, itinerary, venue photographs, clippings and the original footage). All seven translations were completed the same day.
The Singapore exhibition was expanded with a route map on a true outline of China (Albers equal-area conic, to the national standard parameters), an itinerary timeline, and the placing of the “national treasure” epithet.
The 1959 exhibition was rebuilt as a chronological timeline — from the start of the year in Chengdu through selection and farewell, arrival and preparation, the trial dinner, the opening, the first visit to Zhongnanhai and Beidaihe — with two further original photographs added.
Watermarks were applied to the covers and copyright pages of the two books, and the manuscript watermark changed to full-page tiling for legibility.

2 August 2026

The 1959 exhibition launches; the lineage is substantially expanded; the French, German and Spanish revisions conclude

New online exhibition: 1959: Sichuan Cuisine Comes to Beijing, live in all eight languages the same day.
New facts distilled from five WeChat articles were added (the people’s congress credential, a leg ailment, disagreements over dish names among them), and the news page gained further source links, reordered by year.
Added to the life page: disagreements over the year he joined the Party and the year of his first-grade certification, the Jiamusi branch, the Jinshuiyuan episode, and the family’s decision that his ashes remain in Beijing.
Several disciples were added to the lineage, some with independent sources raising their evidence level, and the corresponding certificates and photographs added to the archive.
The Community page gained a submitted essay: “Baiwei Songru: A Life to Look Up To”, by Langtaosha.
The seven-day site-wide revision of the French, German and Spanish editions concluded, with fixes applied from an independent Codex spot-check.

31 July – 1 August 2026

The About page gained a note explaining that titles such as “master” are used as historical narrative, in response to new 2026 rules on awards by social organisations.
Missing or damaged content was restored across many pages in Japanese, Korean, French, German and Spanish — about, committee, life, craft, news and archive, plus the sixteen recipe pages — and some language files were rebuilt.
Fixed a .gitignore rule that had long excluded craft-lessons/ an entire directory: the French, German and Spanish recipe pages had therefore never actually been deployed, and the rule had also concealed file corruption.
A site-wide spot-check fixed structural problems including transposed footer link labels and missing closing tags.

30 July 2026

Source links were added for historical and lineage material, and two new entries added to the life timeline and synchronised to the traditional-Chinese and English editions.
The archive, news and committee pages in traditional Chinese and English were brought fully into line with the Chinese, and the story gallery gained both editions.

29 July 2026

An immersive story gallery was added, and the lineage gained a visual tree, later extended to six languages.
The archive gained a certificate gallery of 21 scans and a photograph section on 1959, and JSON-LD was extended to the core pages in all eight languages.
The dates on certificates CE-005 and CE-006 were corrected against close-up photographs.
The site search index was completed for all eight languages, and accessibility attributes added to images.

26–28 July 2026

The traditional-Chinese edition goes live; navigation and information architecture rebuilt

A full traditional-Chinese translation was added, and the language menu fixed to a standing order.
The full PDF of the biography was removed from the repository over copyright risk; the craft page now shows only the cover and copyright page.
The lineage tree was added and refined over several rounds — inclusion of disciples, independent corroboration, styling — and a role-play question-and-answer section was added to the Wisdom page with an explicit statement that it is inference.
A holdings page was added, later renamed the Digital Archive, and the life page gained an interactive timeline and a map of his movements.
Navigation, search box and language switcher settled after several rounds of repositioning, and structural styling damage was repaired on 10 core pages and 70 language variants.

23–25 July 2026

The site goes live

First release of the Baiwei Songru memorial site, deployed to Tencent Cloud COS and CDN, with the required Chinese ICP and public-security filings completed.
Watermarks were applied to certificates, photographs and clippings, with right-click and drag saving disabled; the date of birth follows the 1993 official obituary, 7 December 1921.
A team section was added, later folded into the About page; entries for Chu Tugen, Yang Jianmin and others were added to the lineage; and the four-level evidence labelling used throughout the site was established.

The honest limits of this log

This page was compiled by hand from the commit history. The early period, from 23 July to 1 August 2026, iterated fast, and not every change left a separately quotable note behind, so these summaries necessarily select. To verify the exact wording and timestamp of any particular change, consult the GitHub commit history or the Internet Archive snapshots linked above: those are the authoritative record. The page will continue to be added to as substantial updates are made, and still omits purely cosmetic and deployment work.